Students’ Alcohol Consumption: Should you drink before finals?
By: Annie Li (Project Lead), Helena Xu, Reilly Chin, Xiaohan Sun
Do you drink as a college student? If so, how often? Do you remember the first time you drank or which bar you went to? While you might still be waiting for your 21st birthday, you may be surprised at how many high school and college students drink alcohol for various purposes. According to Jane Cooley Fruehwirth from the University of Northern Carolina, 54% of students drank pre-pandemic and 46% of students drank mid-pandemic. What’s more, over 35% of students binge-drank pre-pandemic and still 25% of students binge-drank mid-pandemic. As COVID-19 eases and college bars and pubs go back to business, you might find yourself holding a glass of beer or a cocktail and enjoying the euphoric feeling as most students do.
However, as you are savoring the bottle of beer you just ordered, you may not be aware that there could be some trends that relate to your alcohol consumption. Your alcohol consumption can be affected by your daily habits and social relationships, as well as have an influence on your academic performance. According to The Effect of Alcohol Use on Academic Performance of College Students by Anne-Marie Makongho, researchers have found that many factors affect students’ alcohol consumption, and it might affect students’ academic performance both positively and negatively.
In this article, our team examines the possible trends and relationships between college students’ alcohol consumption and age, family relationships, and family professions, and analyzes how alcohol consumption might play a part in affecting students’ grades along with study time, health status, and more. We take advantage of Kaggle datasets of Student Alcohol Consumption. This dataset consists of 382 raw responses from students regarding their age, alcohol consumption, grades, family backgrounds, and other relevant information. In this article, you will read about the potential relationships between various factors, including your age, your parents’ professions, your familial and romantic relationships, your study time, and your health, to your alcohol consumption and grades.
We hope this analysis will be useful to you if you would like to make an estimate on how much you should drink in the future. Should I drink before a final, or should I stay sober?
INFLUENCES ON ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION
Various factors, as we will explore shortly, can determine the levels of alcohol consumption in high school and college students. In particular, students’ age, family relationships, and parents’ professions seem to play a role in how much these students drink.
Age & Alcohol Consumption
Even though you shouldn’t drink before 21, the reported data shows that underage drinking is prevalent. We examined the relationship between students ages 15 to 22 and their daily and weekly alcohol consumption.
The students’ alcohol consumption level ranged from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high). Based on the visualization above, it suggests that the overall workday alcohol consumption is less than the weekend alcohol consumption. For workday alcohol consumption, the level generally increases steadily starting at the age of 15, slightly decreases at age 20, and increases drastically at 22. For weekend alcohol consumption, the first peak appears to be at the age 17 and 18, and decreases at 19 before it levels up when students reach 20 and 21. There are several potential reasons behind this trend. One is obvious: students have more chances to get access to alcohol when they reach legal drinking age. Furthermore, at 17 or 18, students may want to drink more when they reach adulthood, or have more time to drink at the end of high school or entering college. We are glad to see that the alcohol consumption level is relatively lower at the age of 15.
Family relationships & Alcohol Consumption
In the visualizations above, we take a closer look at how a student’s relationship with their family can influence their alcohol consumption. The dataset we used categorizes family relationships and alcohol consumption on a scale from 1 to 5. For the quality of family relationships, a 1 indicates a “very bad” relationship, whereas a 5 implies an “excellent” relationship. In terms of alcohol consumption, a 1 marks a “very low” alcohol consumption, while a 5 signifies a “very high” alcohol consumption. Since people have a preference to go out on weekends rather than during the week because they have classes and school work, we examined both alcohol consumption during workdays and the weekend.
As we would expect, students with a higher-quality family relationship were more likely to consume less alcohol, as the majority of these students had a 1 or 2 alcohol consumption rating, especially for workday alcohol consumption. Weekend alcohol consumption has similar results, except that there were more students with better family relationships who had alcohol consumption ratings of 3, which may be because students have more time on the weekends to have fun. Considering our observations, we speculate that students who have healthy relationships with their family are more obedient and follow the rules that their parents set for them. More importantly, they do not experience much of the stress that comes from mediating between bad family relationships, as stress could lead to excessive drinking. Since many students did not have poor family relationships, there were no distinct patterns. Nevertheless, for students with excellent family relationships, we also saw there was a noticeable portion of students with higher alcohol consumption ratings. While most students with these relationships seem to follow the rules for minimal drinking, there is a portion of these students who are a bit more rebellious or have built more trust with their parents and are able to partake in alcohol consuming activities.
Family professions & Alcohol Consumption
Lastly, we examined the potential relationships between family professions and alcohol consumption. We mostly looked into the relationship between children’s workday alcohol consumption to the jobs of their mothers and fathers, as illustrated in the graphic below.
The parents’ professions are grouped into 5 categories: work at home, teacher, services, health, and other. Unsurprisingly, there are trends and differences in terms of how much alcohol kids drink at their parents’ jobs. For the fathers’ professions, students whose fathers work in the health industry drink the least, followed by those whose fathers work at home and work as teachers. For mothers’ profession, students whose mothers work in the healthy industry drink the least as well, followed by those whose mothers work as teachers and work at home.
Overall, there is a similar trend regarding parents’ profession and alcohol consumption level. For example, children of healthcare workers tend to drink less in the survey and children of service workers or of unspecified professions drink relatively more. What could be the reasons behind this? Parents who work in the health industry might have a clearer sense of the carcinogenic effect of alcohol, and these might affect their kids’ perception of alcohol. Some parents may be stressed due to their jobs, and their drinking habits may be reflected in that of their childrens’ levels of drinking. However, there are also differences in how fathers’ and mothers’ jobs affect their kids respectively. From the graph, we see that mothers’ professions have a larger effect on their children’s alcohol consumption. This corresponds to the fact that on average, mothers are more involved in child-caring activities.
INFLUENCES ON GRADES
Next, we examined the relationship between alcohol consumption, as well as other factors, such as study time, relationship status, and health status, with students’ grades.
Alcohol consumption & Grades
Here, we analyzed how students’ alcohol consumption influences their total grade. Students’ grades were divided into three separate periods, with 0 being the lowest and 20 being the highest grade index for each period. The total grade is found by summing the three grade periods for each student. Similarly, the total alcohol consumption is found by summing each student’s weekday and weekend alcohol consumption (each with 0 being the lowest and 5 being the highest index). While we expected to see a strict inverse relationship between the two variables, the result tells another story. Interestingly, the variability of total grades gradually decreases as alcohol consumption increases. Therefore, students with low alcohol consumption could receive low, mediocre, and high grades, but those with high alcohol consumption tend to be only receiving mediocre grades.
Study time & Grades
What often comes to mind when thinking about possible influences on our grades? The amount of study time. Typically, we believe that there is a positive correlation between how long we study and how high our grades are. In this dataset, study time was categorized into 4 groups: less than 2 hours, 2 to 5 hours, 5 to 10 hours, and more than 10 hours. As shown in the graphic above, which demonstrates the relationship between students’ weekly study time and their final grades, we notice that the median grades for longer periods of time spent studying per week was generally higher.
However, studying for extensive amounts of time doesn’t necessarily mean better grades. The median final grade for students who studied between 5 to 10 hours and that of students who studied for more than 10 hours showed little difference. In fact, we can see that the middle 50% of the students who study from anywhere between 5 to 10 hours had higher final grades compared to the other three groups. This might be because students who study for more than 10 hours per week potentially struggle more with the course materials and need more time to understand it. Of course, each student is different. Generally though, if you want to attempt to raise your grades, you should try to study more. Maybe consider studying between 5 to 10 hours per week.
Other factors: Romantic Relationships and Health Status & Grades
What else could also affect your grades? Besides drinking alcohol, we also found that romantic relationships and health status can make a difference in your grades. From the dataset, those who are in a romantic relationship have slightly lower median grades than those who are not, and the maximum and minimum of the former are both lower than the latter. The difference is not substantial, and the slight difference might be affected by the time and effort students devoted to their relationships compared to their studies.
In addition, students’ health status can also affect their grades periodically. Maybe you would think that students’ grades are positively related to their health status. However, our dataset tells us it is more complicated. In the visualization on the right, we investigated how students’ health status is related to their grades in different periods. The health status is measured on the scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the worst health status, and 5 being the best health status. According to our results, students with the second best (4) and worst (1) health status (on the scale 1–5) have the best median grade for all three grade periods. This might be due to the fact that students with relatively good health status put more effort into studying, and students with a worse health status are limited in other activities, such as sports, resulting in more time devoted to studies. On the other hand, students with medium health status (3) and the best health status (5) have the worst grades in general. This is more complicated and it might be interesting to discover the potential reasons behind that in future analyses.
Conclusion
Overall, alcohol consumption tends to increase with age. Closer and more satisfactory family relationships, as well as certain professions for parents, are likely to decrease the chances of students drinking a lot. As students, a major concern of ours is our grades. Based on our analysis, if you hope to earn higher grades, we recommend attempting to limit your alcohol consumption and spend more time on studying, as well as have a balance with your social relationships. If you’re a high school or college student, hopefully you will consider our findings in this article before you decide how much you’ll drink.
If you’re curious about how we created our visualizations, here is our Github repo.
