Not just fun and games: A review of college drinking games research from 2004 to 2013.

Abstract

Drinking games are a high-risk social drinking activity consisting of rules and guidelines that determine when and how much to drink (Polizzotto et al., 2007). Borsari's (2004) seminal review paper on drinking games in the college environment succinctly captured the published literature as of February 2004. However, research on college drinking games has grown exponentially during the last decade, necessitating an updated review of the literature. This review provides an in-depth summary and synthesis of current drinking games research (e.g., characteristics of drinking games, and behavioral, demographic, social, and psychological influences on participation) and suggests several promising areas for future drinking games research. This review is intended to foster a better understanding of drinking game behaviors among college students and improve efforts to reduce the negative impact of this practice on college campuses.

The influence of groups and alcohol consumption on individual risk-taking

“…Physical-types of the risk-taking behaviour such as risky drinking games (Zamboanga et al, 2014) are often associated with social drinking environments in the real world. The risk-taking measure designed for the current study brings an element of this type of risk-taking by adopting a physical component to form an attractive game for young adults.…”

“…First, it suggests that research in this area should strive to assess risk taking in contexts akin to real-world drinking environments. In this regard, the development of a novel risk measure in Study 3, presents a potential avenue for future risktaking measurement design, due to its physical nature and similarity to real-world drinking games (Tomaso et al, 2015;Zamboanga et al, 2014). Second, findings highlight the variability across risk-taking measures via quantitative synthesis of previous work, and through the utilisation of gambling, driving, physical and non-domain specific riskmeasures in Studies 2 to 5.…”

“…These characteristics present issues when attempting to generalise more widely to non-student populations. As such, care should be taken when seeking to generalise findings from the current thesis to non-student samples who may engage in different drinking practices with conceivable differences with regards to their performance on tasks utilised in the current thesis (e.g., the shuffleboard game in study three) (Tomaso et al, 2015;Zamboanga et al, 2014) Finally, demographic variations between students and non-students may affect risk taking and alcohol consumption practices as a whole. For example, independent of student status, being away from parental supervision (Buddie & Testa, 2005) is associated with increasing levels of alcohol consumption (Evans-Polce, Maggs, Staff, & Lanza, 2017;Littlefield et al, 2009), and experiences of risky sexual situations (Buddie & Testa, 2005).…”

“…In an attempt to measure risk-taking more akin to real-world drinking-related behaviours, whilst also abiding by ethical confines, Study 3 developed the Shuffleboard Game. The game aimed to mimic drinking games capturing an element of risky behaviour, due to the prevalence of drinking games in student alcohol use (Tomaso et al, 2015;Zamboanga et al, 2014). Although such drinking games rarely offer monetary reward, the use of points or hypothetical monetary rewards in tasks used in the thesis may reduce the perception of risk (Xu et al, 2016).…”

“…The Shuffleboard Game was utilised to mimic risky behaviours more akin with real world drinking games (Zamboanga et al, 2014), with the aim of increasing external validity of this risk-taking measure. The purpose of these two studies (Chapters 3 and 4) is to examine both the independent and combined effects of alcohol and group context on individual risk-taking behaviours.…”