Dowdall asserts, that "prior high school drinking by itself is one of the most important predictors of freshman drinking" (58). Such an observation moves the sole focus of the national obsession with binge drinking's being a problem of higher education to its being a problem for the culture as a whole. It returns the gaze to the fundamental causes for a predisposition for binge drinking mentioned in the previous section. If the student was drinking before college, than the problem is not solely an effect of being at college. The problem lies just as much, if not more, with the parenting of the child. As Dowdall relates, "although there are many good reasons to focus on 'college drinking' as a national health problem [ . . .] we need to view early college drinking as embedded in the context of ongoing adolescent development" (43). Focus needs to turn toward successful parenting skills.
The second interesting result of the study is that it found a disconnect between student perception of peer drinking levels and their own. The Wechsler study found that students generally thought that other students on campus drank more than they did (Kellogg, 6). At a college:
Where the actual binge drinking rate was 43%, students indicated that their perception was that 69% of students participated in binge drinking. If students believe that "everyone else is binge drinking" than binge drinking rates are likely to rise because of the influence that "everyone else is drinking."
Whether it is accurate or not, the perceptions of drinking norms have a strong influence on current and future drinking behaviors and they eventually become self-full-filling prophecies.
(Kellogg,...
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