If you live in a coed college dormitory or apartment, you may have noticed a lot of partying going on around you. Students who live in coed housing are much more likely to binge drink regularly, but not as much as students living in fraternity or sorority houses.These were the findings of a new nationwide study of 500 students on five different college campuses.
The study showed that students placed by their universities in coed housing (they didn't choose coed housing themselves) were 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week than students placed in all-male or all-female housing.
More Likely to Binge Drink
Some of the main findings of the study included:
- 42 percent of students in coed housing reported binge drinking on a weekly basis.
- Only 18 percent of students in gender-specific housing reported binge drinking weekly.
- Students in coed dorms were significantly more likely to have had multiple sexual partners.
- Pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.
"In a time when college administrators and counselors pay a lot of attention to alcohol-related problems on their campuses, this is a call to more fully examine the influence of housing environment on student behavior," said Jason Carroll, a study coauthor, in a news release.
"Most of the students who live in gender-specific housing did not request to be there; they were placed there by the university," said lead author Brian Willoughby. "When we first identified these differences with binge drinking, we felt certain that they would be explained by selection effects. But as we examined the data further we found that the differences remained."
If you want to avoid the party scene, you may want to opt out of coed housing, the authors suggest. The bad news for parents is a previous study by Willoughby and Carroll shoed that more than 90 percent of college housing in the United States is coed.
The study was published in the Nov. 17 edition of the Journal of American College Health.
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