Associations Between First-Year Undergraduate Students' Social Goals and Alcohol Consumption: A Qualitative Investigation

Introduction: In the transition to college, freshmen are often tasked with establishing a new social support network.  These students also view alcohol use as fundamental to campus social life and report high social motives for drinking.  Thus, it is possible that first year students associate drinking with friendship creation.  The objective of this project was to investigate first-year students’ opinions and experiences with finding new friends on campus and the associations they hold between alcohol consumption and friendship creation.  

Methods: First-year students were recruited from the psychology department within a large University in the Rocky Mountain region.  A trained graduate student conducted five focus groups with a total of 24 college freshmen (13 female).  Each focus group was recorded using a digital audio recorder and fully transcribed by a trained undergraduate research assistant who had observed the focus group session.  The data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. 

Results: Three themes emerged from the data.  First, participants reported worrying about finding friends on campus and felt it was important to find new friends quickly. Participants noted that having friends helps them to feel more relaxed and less lonely. They also felt that it is easier to make friends early on in the semester before cliques begin to form. Next, participants felt it was surprisingly easy to make new friends. Participants noted there was a considerable amount of socializing early in the fall semester and agreed there were many places on campus to make new friends (e.g. dorms, classes, clubs, dining halls, sports teams, and college-sponsored events).  Finally, students felt drinking might help some freshmen to make new friends or at certain times of the year, but can also inhibit friendship creation.  Most participants suggested alcohol use is not a necessary means for making new friends and some students felt that overconsumption could hinder the friendship creation process. A smaller number of participants thought drinking alcohol might be more likely to help students to make friends early in the semester or that alcohol might help students who are less outgoing.  These participants explained that drinking helps people to act more open, outgoing, and confident as well as to feel more relaxed and less critical of one’s self. 

Conclusions:  It is important for colleges to help freshmen adjust socially while promoting healthy behaviors and activities. Many students identified college-sponsored activities, clubs, and events as locations for finding new friends.  Thus, schools might consider expanding these programs during the first few months of the fall semester when students are socializing the most with the goal of finding new friends.