2008 Woodie Awards
Students underestimate amount of alcohol in a standard drink
Erin Cooper, Staff Writer
Issue date: 3/8/06 Section: Student Life
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"I would definitely say that college students today make their drinks stronger than a standard drink is meant to be," said Natalie Schlercht, junior.
In an ACER news release, they talked about the underestimation of college students with the amount of alcohol they are actually consuming. "For some reason, we've all just sort of assumed that we can take students' responses on surveys at face value," said Aaron M. White, assistant research professor in the department of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and first author of the study, "that if they say they had three drinks, then they really had three drinks."
An individual may say they had had a couple drinks when in reality those couple drinks were consumed in glasses larger than the average glass. This means one could say they had three drinks when in reality it was double the amount of alcohol.
"The reason most college students over estimate is because they don't usually use some type of measuring device when pouring drinks," said Schlerct. "My roommates and I use a jigger when we make mixed drinks so we know how much alcohol we are putting in."
In a study, White and his colleagues conducted with 106 undergraduate students, they asked 54 males and 52 females to complete a 12-item survey. This survey was designed to see how each individual measured how much alcohol a 'standard' drink had. The individuals poured either shots of hard liquor, poured beer, or alcohol for a mixed drink into different sized cups. The different individuals chose the different sizes of the cups based on their own interpretation of what a 'standard' cup size looked like. When this was completed the drinks they made were compared with the standard drinks used in the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study survey(s).
The results showed that students overestimated how much fluid they needed in order to make a standard drink. "Regardless of which type of drink we asked students to pour," said White, "they almost always poured too much. When asked to pour a standard size beer into a 32-ounce cup, some students filled the cup to the top! For these students, each of their drink actually equaled 2.5 standard drinks."