A national survey issued Friday reports that college students have a largely accurate perception of binge drinking on campus, while another study issued the same day reports that they do not.
The Harvard School of Public Health reported in its survey that the median of American undergraduates estimate a 35 percent rate of binge drinking on college campuses, close to the commonly accepted 44 percent rate reported in a 1999 Harvard study.
It also reported that the student estimates of binge drinking were within 10 percent of the actual rates at 60 percent of the colleges surveyed.
The report was based on the 1999 survey responses of 14,138 students at 119 colleges in 40 states and is published in the September issue of the Journal of American College Health.
A contradictory report from The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention reported that seven out of 10 college students overestimated the weekly alcohol intake of their peers.
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The survey was administered to 300 randomly selected students at each of the 18 participating colleges nationwide. It had a response rate of 53.4 percent.
The conflicting studies were released in the midst of a growing debate among health care providers over the use of the term "binge drinking" in describing alcohol use on college campuses.
"The term is not helpful, because the perception of a binge is not consistent with the reality," said Susan Bruce, Director of the University's Center for Alcohol and Substance Education. "It tends to exaggerate the problem."
The widely accepted clinical definition of a drinking binge is consuming four drinks in one sitting for a woman and five for a man. Critics argue that the indefinite time frame of a sitting as well as the varying levels of alcohol tolerance among college students make the term too ambiguous.
In a statement released last month, the Inter-Association Task Force on Alcohol and Other Substance Abuse Issues said the four- to five-drink definition first used by the Harvard School of Public Health in a 1993 study is too narrow.
"By using this definition, large numbers of college students (at least 40 percent in most national surveys) are lumped into what is widely promoted as problematic and even dangerous behavior," the statement said.
The task force suggested using terms such as "high risk" or "less harmful use" to describe alcohol use among college students, while reserving the use of the term "binge drinking" to "denote a prolonged (usually two days or more) period of intoxication."
According to CASE's most recent study of alcohol use, 65 percent of students at the University consume zero to five drinks in an average week. If those five drinks are consumed in one sitting, however, the students could be classified as binge drinkers.
"My goal is to provide the most accurate unbiased information about alcohol use to students," Bruce said. "And a negative term like 'binge drinking' focuses on the problem rather than the solution"
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