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Classifying risky-drinking college students: another look at the two-week drinker-type categorization *.

Article Excerpt
HEAVY EPISODIC DRINKING, or binge drinking, defined by Wechsler and colleagues (1994) as the consumption of five or more drinks in one sitting for men and four or more drinks in one sitting for women, has sparked attention among researchers. Despite widespread public exposure after the release of the results of the College Alcohol Study (CAS; Wechsler et al., 1994), many have presented arguments against the term "binge drinking," arguing that "binge" inaccurately represents the behavior of college students (Lederman et al., 2000) and refers to a prolonged period of drinking--for example, "going on a 3-day binge" (Milgram and Anderson, 2000). Additionally, others report that students who consume five/four drinks may never actually reach dangerous blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels (Beirness et al., 2004; Lange and Voas, 2001; Perkins et al., 2001).

Despite the arguments against the term "binge drinking," researchers in the field of college student drinking have attempted to categorize college student drinkers based on the number of drinking occasions in the past 2 weeks that they consumed five/four or more drinks in one sitting (Wechsler and Austin, 1998; Wechsler and Nelson, 2001; Wechsler et al., 1994, 2000). Based on this time period and using the binge-drinking terminology, four categories of drinker type have been defined as follows: nondrinker (student who has not consumed alcohol in the past year), nonbinge drinker (student who consumed alcohol in the past year but did not consume five/four drinks or more in one sitting during the past 2 weeks), binge drinker (student who has consumed five/four drinks in one sitting one or two times in the past 2 weeks), and frequent binge drinker (student who has consumed five/four drinks in one sitting three or more times in the past 2 weeks). Although many have presented arguments against the term "binge drinking," there is no research to date assessing or justifying the use of this 2-week period.

One potential problem with a 2-week criterion is that heavy episodic drinking behavior may vary greatly from week to week and a 2-week period may not be sufficient to determine normative drinking behavior. Nonetheless, drinker type may be used to determine treatment outcomes of participants (i.e., used to assess whether the heaviest drinkers decreased their drinking behavior postintervention) but may not accurately reflect the necessary action of the treatment. Finally, the 2-week drinker-type definition is sometimes used to determine inclusion in alcohol interventions (e.g., Turrisi et al., 2001; Werch et al., 2000), and although students may need an intervention, they may not receive it if they do not meet the necessary drinker-type criteria within the last 2 weeks.

The current study seeks to determine the effectiveness of the 2-week drinker-type definition. By collecting an entire month of drinking event data for each participant, we compare the drinking behavior and resulting drinker-type category during the last 2 weeks of 1 month of behavior (the current definition) with the drinking behavior and resulting drinker-type category during the first 2 weeks of the month. We hypothesize that there will be inconsistencies in drinker-type categories across 1 month of drinking behavior, thereby suggesting that a 2-week definition of drinker type is too brief a period to accurately categorize student drinkers. Additionally, we will examine if the suggestion of Wechsler and colleagues (Wechsler and Austin, 1998; Wechsler et al., 1995; Wechsler and Nelson, 2001)--that each subsequent drinker type experiences more alcohol-related problems than the preceding drinker type--is applicable in our sample. Finally, we will examine the variability among the riskiest drinkers: those with a frequent-binge-drinker label.

Method

Participants

This study used three different samples--volunteer students, students adjudicated for violating campus alcohol policies, and male freshmen assessed during their initial semester. All participants were part of broader group interventions at a private West...

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