Residential Learning Communities Positively Affect College Binge Drinking

Abstract

Recent surveys demonstrate that college students "binge drink" or engage in high-risk episodic drinking at high rates across the country. This drinking pattern has been associated with most of the serious health, legal, and academic problems faced by students and colleges. This study explored how living in a residential learning community affects drinking behaviors. Students living in three different residential learning communities at a large, midwestern public university were found to binge drink at significantly lower rates than did matched comparison groups who lived in another university residence hall. Further, learning community residents also suffered fewer problems arising from either their own drinking or that of others. We interpret these results as suggesting that new social norms—peer expectations about acceptable behavior— are created within the learning communities that positively affect binge drinking and its associated problems. These preliminary findings are promising indicators that student housing deliberately structured to promote community and academic involvement can reduce problem drinking behaviors, even when no explicit alcohol programming is involved.