Swipe for Your Right to Party: Gender, Social Structure, and Social Media in College Drinking Intensity

ABSTRACT

College drinking scholars have built a deep literature around the ways in which gender shapes drinking culture and its outcomes. Few have explicitly explored the way that gender combines with other structural attributes, like social class, and works through social media interaction to predict drinking intensity. We investigate the way gender, identity, and different types of social media involvement can help explain drinking intensity among college students at an institution with a strong party culture. A series of nested regressions show that men’s drinking intensity is more strongly associated with dimensions of male identity related to family social class and father’s political leaning. Furthermore, we find a complex relationship between drinking intensity and different dimensions of social media use. For both college women and men, there is a positive association between the intensity of use of general social media platforms and drinking intensity, but this association is not significant when accounting for their involvement in college party culture. However, after accounting for party culture involvement, our results suggest that use of apps related to hookup culture participation may represent an additional dimension that is associated with drinking intensity, a finding that seems especially prominent for some men. We conclude by discussing implications, limitations, and directions for future research

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard T. Welser

Howard T. Welser (PhD, University of Washington, 2006) is a professor of sociology at Ohio University. He studies how the structure of interaction generates collective outcomes, drawing especially on data at the intersection of social media and everyday life. His work appears in a wide range of journals—Telematics and Informatics, Social Science Research, Information, Communication & Society, Small Group Research, and Rural Sociology—as well as edited volumes and conference proceedings—iConference, Hawaii International Conference on Social Systems (HICSS), and the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).

Brenna Helm

Brenna Helm is a doctoral candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on terrorists’ and extremists’ use of the Internet, male supremacist movements, right-wing extremism, and the progression of hate and extremist beliefs on- and offline.

Thomas Vander Ven

Thomas Vander Ven (PhD, University of Cincinnati, 1998) is a professor of sociology and faculty athletics representative at Ohio University. He has authored and coauthored articles on crime and delinquency, criminological theory, college drinking culture, sexual violence on campus, and serial violence. He is the author of Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard (2011, NYU Press).