Drinking Behaviors of VT Students

Drinking Behaviors of Virginia Tech Students

Each year the Schiffert Health Center conducts a survey to determine the health and wellness of Virginia Tech students. The results presented here are based on the February 2002 random survey of 1,026 students.

VT Students Party Positive | Total Consumption by VT Students | How Data Was Collected | Return Rate

Virginia Tech Students Party Positive

60% of VT students...	have 8 or fewer drinks per week, or do not drink.
75% of VT students...	indicate that not drinking, or having only a few drinks, is more fun than getting drunk.
76% of VT students...	reduce their risk of negative outcomes by not chugging or funneling drinks.
76% of VT students ...	believe that encouraging someone to engage in high-risk drinking is not cool.
77% of VT students...	drink 2 or fewer times a week, or do not drink.
80% of VT students...	have 3-or-fewer drinks when in a potentially intimate situation, and 54% don’t drink.
90% of VT students...	believe that bragging about drinking alcohol consumption is not cool.
More than 15,000 VT students...	do not miss class because of drinking, or attend class with a hangover.

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Total Consumption by Virginia Tech Students

We wanted to look at the total amount of alcohol that is consumed by Virginia Tech students and see who is consuming this alcohol. As you might expect, not everyone consumes the same amount of alcohol, in fact most of the alcohol is consumed by a minority of students.
Let’s look at what we found:
18% of VT students are currently nondrinkers, that is they have not consumed any alcohol in the last year. In fact about 8% of students have never consumed any alcohol.
34% consume only 7% of all the alcohol consumed by VT students. This means, if we include the nondrinkers, that 52% of students only drink 7% of all the alcohol consumed.
*The next 28%* drink 26% of all the alcohol consumed*. These are your average drinkers, who drink an average of 1.6* times per week and average 5.1 drinks per drinking occasion. Adding each of these categories together, this means that 80% of students drink only 33% of all the alcohol consumed.
*The next 10%, those in the 80th to 89th percentile, drink 21%* of all the alcohol consumed** . They consume about twice as much as the average VT student.
*Finally, the upper 10% of VT students consume 46%* of all the alcohol consumed** at VT. In other words, they drink about 4x as much as the average VT student.
People are always wondering if there is a serious drinking problem at Virginia Tech. To answer this question, all we need to do is look at the table at right, and we see that “most VT students are making low-risk choices about alcohol.” *Only about 20%* of students are experiencing repeated problems with alcohol*. With 10%* having the greatest difficulties making low-risk choices. For example, most students do not let alcohol interfere with their academics, and most students (77%) drink two of fewer times a week. It is interesting to note that the 10% of very high-risk drinkers on campus closely corresponds to the percentage of the general population that have an alcohol problem, what we would classify as “alcoholic-like” drinking.

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How Our Data Was Collected

The Virginia Tech Wellness Survey is conducted each year to determine the wellness of Virginia Tech students. The random survey is conducted each February, and is e-mailed to 2,000 randomly selected undergraduate students. The most recent survey was conducted during the 5th week of the 2002 spring semester. A drawing for $1,000 and five $100 gift certificates were offered as an incentive to complete the survey.

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Return Rate

One thousand and twenty-six students completed the surveys, a return rate of 51%. The return rate for Greeks and Athletes (traditionally the highest drinking groups) were the same as that of the entire sample. From the returned surveys, responses were randomly selected to reflect the actual proportions of the different subpopulations of Virginia Tech students (i.e., gender, ethnicity, academic class, on/off-campus residents, athletes, and Greeks). This yields a database that is representative of the Virginia Tech student body.

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