Exploring Drinking on Davidson’s Campus

The changes to the alcohol policy outlined in last week's article were prompted by a close examination of Davidson's social culture that began two years ago. President Tom Ross formed the Presidential Task Force on Alcohol, a committee chaired by Associate Dean of Students and Director of Residence Life Patty Perillo, whose job it was to explore Davidson's alcohol culture. This committee interviewed numerous students, faculty, and staff, and they inspected data concerning alcohol and drug use on campus from the annual CORE Drug and Alcohol Survey.

This assessment, administered by the CORE Institute at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale (SIUC), was developed in the late 1980's by the U.S. Department of Education. Colleges and universities across the country use it to gauge alcohol and other drug usage, attitudes, and perceptions on their campuses.

"For a long time we just got the data and compared Davidson to all other colleges and universities," Perillo said.  "But it's really hard to compare a small, private liberal arts college to big state institutions, and so in some ways the data wasn't generalizable."

The task force decided to do things differently by comparing Davidson to a smaller sample of other colleges – 20 peer institutions that are also highly selective small liberal arts schools.  Out of the 20 institutions Davidson sees as its peers, 13 had data from the CORE survey.  Given confidentiality concerns, Davidson was never told which of the peer schools the 13 were, but their data provided a measure by which we could compare social cultures.

For a summary of some of the CORE survey's findings comparing Davidson to 13 peer institutions see the sidebar entitled "CORE Survey Findings."   

College drinking cultures are not new. "The thing about alcohol use and misuse on college campuses has been a conundrum or dilemma for eons," Perillo said. "Every college and university in the country is dealing with these issues. So it's a really, really, really complex issue."

But Perillo and Health Educator Georgia Ringle outlined a variety of forces that they believe may be contributing to the specific alcohol culture on Davidson's campus.

For example, Ringle thinks that the campus mentality around alcohol on campus is set by a minority of students who are drinking much more than five drinks per week. They set "the peer standard because they're out there having more fun, playing the music, talking about it, whereas the non-drinkers don't say, ‘Guess what I did Saturday night, it was so cool!'  I mean they should, but they're not quite as boisterous.

"So there could be kind of a core group of 200 that are always leading the pack, saying ‘Come on, come on we should go out.  Let's pregame in my room; let's go down,'" Ringle continued. "But if you actually study each individual's drinking, most are moderate."

In fact, she has data indicating that 53.5% of Davidson students drink five drinks or less per week. "Now, would I like that 53.5% to be higher? Yes," Ringle said. "But most students imagine everyone's drinking much more than five. I want to give back the actual truth and fact to the students, and this number is a lot lower than what most students imagine. What we have found – and this is not just Davidson – is that if students think everyone's drinking more, they will raise their drinking level to match their perception."  She pointed out that 28% of students at Davidson do not drink alcohol on a weekly basis.

Perillo is no stranger to examining drinking behaviors in college students. While working as Director of Housing at the University of Maryland prior to coming to Davidson, she wrote her dissertation on college drinking behaviors and their impact on learning. Her research led her to the field of social norming. "What social norms theory says is that at a time when young people have a need to feel connected – fit in, feel a sense of belonging – if others are doing it, they're going to feel this internal pressure to do it too as a way to fit in and feel connected," Perillo said.

Based on the responses to the CORE surveys, Perillo and the Alcohol Culture Committee found that "Davidson College students used more decoys than other students at peer institutions, meaning they would go to parties and just hold a red cup even though the red cup didn't have alcohol in it – simply because they felt like they needed to do it, which contributes to this notion of wanting to fit in and this sense of pressure," Perillo said.

Consistent with Ringle's view on the tendency for students to overestimate how much drinking is actually going on at Davidson, Perillo noted that "more often than not on college campuses, the perception of use is greater than the actual use. And if the students perceive that everybody is drinking, then it will impact their own choice around use. What social norms theory says is we need to continue to get out messages of what the real use is because if you get out messages of what the real use is, it could change student behaviors." To do this, Ringle and the Health Advisors are in the process of kicking off a social norming campaign in which students will be exposed to actual data about drinking at Davidson.

The geography of Davidson's small, residential campus may influence the heightened perception students have regarding drinking on campus. "In the center of our campus is Patterson Court, where students get to see visibly every weekend social events happening with alcohol right before them," Perillo said. "And so it continues to perpetuate and promote this sense that this is a drinking culture.