Alcohol Abuse in College
One website which I have found to be credible is www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov. This website was created by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. This is a government agency that created a task force on college drinking in 1998. This website contains insights from different agencies such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Department of Justice, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration and many others. The goals of this site are to provide information about the dangers of college binge drinking and offer recommendations to campuses and research groups on how to deal with the problems of college drinking. This website is very informative for many different groups offering links to information for college students, college parents, college professors, as well as high school students and parents. Chapter 9 in the Drugs and Behavior text relates to this topic. This website is up to date having been last reviewed on September 9, 2005. This site is interesting because it gives a lot of detailed information broken up into specific groups of information for different groups of people. I feel this site could be useful for a lot of people in many different ways.
Another website relating to college drinking is www.aboutcollege.com/drink. I found this website to be non-credible. The website is maintained by a group called Adirondack Solutions Inc. I could find no information on the website about this group, what their purpose is, or who they really are. The website is very general and does not offer much information about college drinking. It is out of date, showing 1997 as the last year the site was updated. The website is not very informative or insightful. It only gives general information and statistics. The website cites only two articles and both are outdated, one is dated 1992 and the other is dated 1996. The purpose of this website seems to be to give college students a very general overview of the dangers of drinking, but offering nothing to back up what they are saying to be true. I found this site interesting because of the lack of information. This site is a perfect example of why it is necessary to ensure the website you are using is actually giving factual, updated information.
A journal article titled Binge Drinking and Alcohol Related Problems among Community College Students: Implications for Prevention Policy gives more information relating to college drinking. The first website, as I mentioned, gives information to college and high school students. This article takes into consideration the college students going to a community college and attempts to address the problem of college drinking on that level. Much like the website www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov, this article seeks to find ways of reducing the problem of college drinking among community college students.
References:
College Drinking-Changing the Culture. (2005). Retrieved March 5, 2006, from www.collegedrinkingprevention.com.
Drinking and Drugs. (1997). Retrieved March 5, 2006, from www.aboutcollege.com/drink.
Hanson, G.R., Venturelli, P.J., & Fleckenstein, A.E. (2004). Drugs and Society (8th ed.). Sudberry, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
Sheffield, F. D., Darkes, J., Del Boca, F.K., Goldman, M.S. (2005). Binge Drinking and Alcohol Related Problems among Community College Students: Implications for Prevention Policy. Journal of American College Health, 54, 137-41.
