Alcohol use among Hispanic college students along the US Mexico border Article Review

, & Martinez, V. Alcohol use among Hispanic college students along the US/Mexico border. The American journal of drug and alcohol abuse, 42(6), 707-714. Summarize the paper (ALL questions must be answered) o what were the hypotheses? The paper was based on various hypotheses that were linked to the issue of alcohol abuse among Hispanic college students along the US/Mexico border. The primary assumption behind the study that Hispanic students would display different levels of alcohol consumption based on the fact that in this region, as opposed to other areas where they are a minority, Hispanic students make the majority of the student population. The Brief Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans-II (ARSMA_II) was used as a dimensional scale for this purpose.

The scoring for ethnic orientation was based on factors including but not limited to the frequency in which they spoke Spanish/English, read in Spanish/English, thought in Spanish/English and listened to Spanish/English music. Also, from the initial findings, regressive analysis was used in order to expand the data to make it significant enough to be conclusive where the data was thought to be small. O What were the results? More men than women reported to have consumed alcohol than men within the thirty day period before the study. 4% of the men and 43. Nonetheless, the research’s initial findings on drinking habits of the periods before the study did not reveal significant influence on alcohol consumption by either enculturation or acculturation.

The analysis showed that higher Anglo orientation predicted fewer drinks on any occasion and fewer drinks per occasion. Moreover, Mexican orientation did not significantly predict drinking patterns of the Hispanic student population, as opposed to the assumption that the more aligned with the majority culture the individual is, the more the alcohol consumption. Also, the study established that the younger the student, the more frequent the drinking was-younger students spent more days per week drinking. The findings suggested that Hispanic college students who take up aspects of the Anglo culture including frequently using media in English, frequently speaking English and frequently writing in English, are significantly less likely to consume alcohol. O Did you have any questions/comments about the methods that were used? Yes.

I think that the methods used should have included other parameters such as the number of students that had reported suffering from alcohol addiction, or had suffered from alcohol-related illnesses and compared these figures with Hispanic students from other institutions where Hispanics from institutions where they were a minority. Also, the questions should have included the thoughts of students –for instance, did they feel pressured to drink by their counterparts? Did they feel experience more freedom to drink now that they schooled in a school with a Hispanic majority? Did they drink the same way when in environments with a different racial composition? Also, the study should have included more women to provide more accurate data on gender-based differences on alcohol consumption.

O What improvements to the methods would you recommend in order to exclude any possible confounding factors? 3. Come up with relevant new ideas that could be further explored (THREE questions must be answered) o what could be further investigated along this line of research? The influence of gender on drinking could be investigated along this research, and the relationship between gender and acculturation and gender and enculturation. In the white community, females are increasingly taking up habits previously associated with males, such as use of illegal substances and aggressive drinking. Also, white males have a higher tendency for binge drinking compared to other populations and would thus give different responses in the binge drinking section of questions. Moreover, a different population, based on its history and culture, could portray significantly different drinking habits.