Adolescent Risk-Taking and Drinking

A truism in the field of alcohol, other drug, and violence prevention, at
least historically, has been that adolescent risk taking is the result of
impulsive choices driven by an under developed capacity to think rationally.
This belief has driven the work of AODV prevention professionals for
years...up to and including the present. But new research coming out of
Temple and Cornell Universities is suggesting that this staple of
conceptualizing prevention programming for high school and college
adolescents may need to be revisited...if not rethought.

" Decision research shows that adolescents make the risky judgments they do
because they are actually, in some ways, *more rational* than adults.
Grownups tend to quickly and intuitively grasp that certain risks (e.g.,
drunk driving, unprotected sex, and most anything involving sharks) are just
too great to be worth thinking about, so they don't proceed down the
"slippery slope" of actually calculating the odds. Adolescents, on the other
hand, actually take the time to weigh risks and benefits — possibly deciding
that the latter outweigh the former. (It is during adolescence, in fact,
that the parts of the frontal lobe that govern risk/reward calculations
undergo significant maturation.)" This is a quote from a piece published in
the Association of Psychological Science's Observer - see
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2098 for the
full piece.

This is a very intriguing piece of information. If this is true--and the
science appears to exist to suggest that it is--this may mean that we
involved in the prevention of "high-risk" drinking and other drug use by
high school and college students may need to rethink our approach to
prevention, not to mention the term used to refer to the type of drinking
these students do. Most of us involved in the prevention of "high-risk"
collegiate drinking are aware of the controversy that has existed in the
field regarding how to refer to collegiate drinking since the Harvard School
of Public Health coined the term "binge drinking" in 1994 to refer to the
consumption of 4+ drinks for women and 5+ drinks for men during an outing.
The field has been divided as to the utility of this term when discussing
the phenomenon of collegiate drinking ever since - see my essay on the
subject --  http://www.robertchapman.net/essays/about.htm

In that 2003 essay I suggested referring to this type of collegiate drinking
as being "high-risk," but it would appear that this too may be no better a
moniker  for this type of collegiate imbibing than is "binge drinking." If,
as I suspect, Drs. Reyna at Cornell and Farley at Temple are correct, we in
the prevention field need to not only rethink how we approach adolescents
with our prevention messages, but revisit the language we use when doing so
as well. If there is a "Type-T" personality (Thrill-seeking) as these
researches proffer, this type of student may actually be titillated by our
messages designed to reduce "high-risk" consumption. Perhaps Linda
Lederman's suggestion to refer to this type of collegiate drinking as
dangerous is the more appropriate way to proceed.

What do you think?


Best regards,
Robert

Read my three-monograph series, "When They Drink," at http://www.robertchapman.net and clicking "online resources"