Shock Study: High Schoolers, Collegians Drink To Get Buzzed, Then Hook Up

More science:

Call “pre-gaming” by any of its other names and it still translates the same for substance abuse specialists seeking strategies to control the ubiquitous “pre-party,” generally defined as a small group of students drinking together in a dorm room or other private space prior to an actual party or social event.

New research presented Friday at the U.S. Department of Education’s conference on creating safe and healthy campuses suggests that students are strategic in their approach to the pre-game, measuring their shots to obtain the bull’s-eye perfect buzz, the gathering often serving not one, but multiple purposes.

An “exploratory study” of Pennsylvania students’ pre-gaming habits found that college students use pre-parties as a mechanism for getting buzzed while enjoying a safe environment, cutting costs, and short-circuiting law enforcement, bouncers and a need for a valid I.D. The students are also seeking to bond with friends and set themselves up for a sexual experience later on – two particularly telling objectives given what researchers found to be a profound sense of social anxiety and loneliness among focus group participants.

“The game is all about hooking up, having a sexual experience,” Beth DeRicco, associate director of the Center for College Health and Safety, said Friday at the conference, held in Arlington. DeRicco teamed with the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to host focus groups at 10 of the state’s colleges this winter to study students’ nighttime rituals and their attitudes toward what DeRicco called “a real embedded culture from campus to campus about pre-gaming.”

I guess it might be getting worse, so maybe I shouldn't mock this as silly. Yes, perhaps this has always been going on -- to an extent -- but now maybe it's worse than ever before.

Thanks to Slublog, who reports he used to "pre-game" in his college days, in order to have a "nice buzz on" for "Family night" when he'd get to sit in his dormroom and beat it to Kristy MacNichol.

Who, you know, wasn't really very cute at all.

Meanwhile... Briish teens are the most sexually actve in all of Europe. 38% of fifteen year olds report having had sex.

The sexual revolution seems to have stalled out in the eighties, due mostly to AIDS, not any increase in sexual restraint, but now the spectre of death seems all but forgotten and the swinging seventies are back.

At least for teenagers.

posted by Ace at 07:39 PM

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