Deviance Today by Addrain Conyers Thomas C. Calhoun

Author:Addrain Conyers, Thomas C. Calhoun [Addrain Conyers, Thomas C. Calhoun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Reference, Sociology, General, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9781000080681
Google: fwYHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-04T05:14:49+00:00

Binge Drinking

The next problem area that was created through a social construction was binge drinking, which is heavily focused on college and university students. The reasons for this need explanation.

Both the focus on drinking and driving and the changes in drinking age had, respectively, a heavy and an exclusive focus on youth. For the drinking driver issue, young children were the original victims and adults were the villains. However, this shifted over time, and young drivers were increasingly viewed as particularly problematic when their driving was combined with alcohol, for two reasons: first the younger the driver, the less the experience with driving, and knowledge of how to handle states of impairment; second, drinking driving combinations seemed to frequently occur when multiple young people were in a vehicle. This led eventually to regulations in many states making it illegal for younger drivers and their peers to travel together in cars without the presence of an adult.

Among alcohol researchers, the term binge drinking had a well-established meaning. Drinkers would consume alcohol for a long period of time, ignoring their other responsibilities and simply staying drunk until some external force intervened, such as running out of money or becoming physically exhausted. Such behavior was not common, but the term “going on a binge” had clearly negative and highly deviant cultural connotations.

Next, while the concept of alcoholism was fairly well established, there was no consensus on the meaning of heavy drinking. Cahalan (1970) and his research team successfully promoted the idea of “problem drinking,” which tended to minimize absolute amounts of consumption but focus instead on the consequences associated with drinking. Nonetheless, to be a problem drinker, it was necessary to drink, and scientists puzzled over the issue of how much drinking was likely to lead to significant trouble. Compounding the problem is that other than artificial experiments that are difficult to conduct with human subjects, the survey is the main method of data collection in this type of alcohol research. It has been repeatedly established that heavier drinkers are less likely to report their drinking accurately when approached by a researcher, the reasons being obvious.

In American residential universities, the matter of alcohol consumption has a very long history, and of course college campuses are unique in the freedom that is provided to what are often massive populations of young adults who are still being socialized into the norms of adulthood. An early study of youthful drinkers argued that drinking was a highly significant marker of adulthood, and thus large numbers of males (and later females) sought to establish their movement into symbolic adulthood through consuming alcohol (Maddox and McCall, 1964). Thus the expectation this symbolism will persist and likely heighten with movement into college is reasonable. At the same time, many in the public “looking in” on the residential college setting view it with negatively tinged ambivalence as a “hothouse” for deviant activity involving alcohol, drugs, and sex with little or no adult supervision. Those in the public holding these opinions would readily assent to increased social control in these settings.

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