The European university system and legal provisions related to alcohol consumption differ considerably from those in North America. Thus, research of the kind suggested might indicate opportunities for community health preventive interventions. This paper examines the effects of alcohol use on high school students’ quality of learning. We estimate fixed-effects models using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our primary measure of academic achievement is the student’s GPA abstracted from official school transcripts. We find that increases in alcohol consumption result in small yet statistically significant reductions in GPA for male students and in statistically non-significant changes for females.
2Although the uncentered stressor measures at the daily, semester, and student levels were intercorrelated (rs ranged from 0.45–0.72), multicollinearity indexes calculated in regression models showed little evidence of multicollinearity. The lowest tolerance value was 0.3 and the highest variance inflation factor (VIF) was 3.0, where tolerances of 0.1 and below or VIFs of 10 and above indicate serious problems with multicollinearity (J. Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003). Using data from the longitudinal Brain and Alcohol Research in College Students study, Meda et al. looked at the impact of alcohol and marijuana use on the United States students’ grade point averages (GPAs) (Meda et al., 2017[11]). They showed that students using moderate to high levels of alcohol but low levels of marijuana had lower GPAs, but this difference became non-significant over time. However, students using both substances had lower GPAs throughout the two-year investigation period. It is important to understand whether the identified association between alcohol use and education outcomes is causal; in other words, whether alcohol use causes a change in education outcomes.
4 Self-reported versus abstracted GPA
Groups typically focus on helping acquaintances and loved ones understand that they are not responsible for the behavior and actions of a sufferer of alcoholism. Such organizations may offer aid in the form of group therapy sessions, resources for development and community support for members seeking friends outside of their normal environment. Many also offer training on how to assist a loved one with coming to grips with the condition and facing the problems that now plague the family, business or relationship. 2Grades and numerical grade-point equivalents have been established for varying levels of a student’s academic performance. Grades of A, A-, and B+ with respective grade-point equivalents of 4.00, 3.67, and 3.33 represent an “excellent” quality of performance. Grades of B, B−, and C+ with grade-point equivalents of 3.00, 2.67, and 2.33 represent a “good” quality of performance.
To avoid binge drinking and its consequences, college students (and all people who drink) are advised to track the number of drinks they consume over a given period of time. Friends, family and other people that a person suffering the effects of alcoholism interacts with on a regular basis are all likely to experience problems related to the condition. As alcohol abuse progresses, sufferers are likely to withdraw from society at large and may lash out at well-meaning acquaintances who seek to help them come to grips with addiction. Financial problems are likely to arise due to not only the costs of supporting a drug addiction but also the loss of productivity and regular work hours due to increased illness, hangovers and other adverse effects.
Consequences of binge drinking: Risk and protective factors
While increased drinking could lead an adolescent to drop out of school, reduced drinking could lead a dropout to re-enroll. Of those who were in 10th and 11th grades in Wave 1, the dropout rates were 3.7% and 5.0%, respectively. Our core estimates would be biased if the effect of alcohol use on GPA for non-dropouts differed systematically from the unobserved effect of alcohol use on GPA for dropouts and re-enrollers in the event that these students had stayed in school continuously. The objective of this analysis was to identify a potential causal relationship between alcohol use and educational outcomes. By measuring alcohol use in one wave and educational outcomes in a later wave, temporal precedence can be established – one of the requirements for causality (Oppewal, 2010[15]). Unless new drinking habits are formed during the pandemic, decreases in alcohol use among college students are unlikely to be sustained as social distancing measures are removed.
Logistic regression models controlling for drinking frequency measured the association between social context and problems, among 728 current drinkers. The sample here is not the representative of the true population, as the participants were selected only from the Portuguese language class of two schools. However, findings of this research are consistent with the economic theory that alcohol has negative effect on the students grades but more research is required in this area to prove that it’s consumption in limited quantity as a recreational activity may not affect the grades significantly. The analysis provides overwhelming evidence that alcohol plays a significant effect in determining the final grades of secondary school students (F-value 7.36). Weekend alcohol consumption has no significant effect on grades (one sided p-value 0.2551) whereas weekday alcohol consumption has statistically significant negative effect on the final grades (one sided p-value 0.0256) i.e. 1 unit increase in alcohol consumption decreases the grades by 1.67%.
Effect of Alcohol Use on Academic Performance of School Students
This possibility is suggested by Renna (2008), who uses a research design similar to that used by Dee and Evans (2003) and finds that although binge drinking does not affect high school completion rates, it does significantly increase the probability that a student graduates with a GED rather than a high school diploma. Recent neurological research suggests that underage drinking can impair learning directly by causing alterations in the structure and function of the developing brain with consequences reaching far beyond adolescence (Brown et al., 2000; White & Swartzwelder, 2004). Negative effects of alcohol use can emerge in areas such as planning and executive functioning, memory, spatial operations, and attention (Brown et al., 2000; Giancola & Mezzich, 2000; Tapert & Brown, 1999). Alcohol use could also affect performance by reducing the number of hours committed to studying, completing homework assignments, and attending school. A common and comprehensive measure of high school students’ learning is Grade Point Average (GPA). GPA is an important outcome because it is a key determinant of college admissions decisions and of job quality for those who do not attend college.
- Alcohol consumption measures came from the Eurostat European Health Interview Survey schedule and from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) questionnaire [22].
- Under-reporting of alcohol use is a widely recognised issue with studies that use self-reported alcohol consumption data.
- Support organizations exist for friends and family members of those with alcohol use disorders due to the problems created by the condition.
- In general, the most effective interventions in CollegeAIM represent a range of counseling options and policies related to sales and access.
Therefore, we hypothesized that social anxiety would be (1) positively correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed per drinking episode, but (2) negatively correlated with the frequency of alcohol use. Furthermore, we hypothesized that (3) social anxiety would be positively related to ARPs, given the high rates of comorbidity between SAD and AUDs. Alcohol use can lead to a wide range of problems (e.g., involvement in risky sexual situations, driving under the influence, hangovers, nausea and vomiting, and aggression). Due to the high how does alcohol affect relationships levels of alcohol consumption and the contexts in which college students typically consume alcohol (e.g., parties where excessive drinking is the norm), along with no parental oversight and monitoring, this population may be particularly likely to experience alcohol-related problems (ARPs). Of college students who drank at least once per week during their first year of college, 80% experienced more than one ARP during their first year, and 34% reported that they had experienced six or more ARPs during that time (Mallett et al., 2011).
1Due to a significant fraction of missing responses, we imputed household income and household welfare status using both predicted values on the basis of other covariates and the sample mean for households that were also missing some of the predicting covariates. Here’s a snapshot of just a few organizations that may offer valuable support for families dealing with the effects of alcoholism. Family therapy is an effective option to address myriad issues that arise in connection to alcohol misuse.
By considering the larger matrix of motivational, situational, relational, and temporal factors, the social context perspective provides a more complete means of understanding the circumstances under which college students drink. By contrast, more recent economic studies that arguably use better estimation methods have found that drinking has modest or negligible effects on educational attainment. Dee and Evans (2003) studied the effects of teen drinking on high school completion, college entrance, and college persistence.
