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R/£ Co-ed digs lead to binges and sex
November 26, 2009 Edition 1
NEW YORK: Students sharing accommodation with members of the opposite sex are more likely to binge drink and have sex than those living in all-male or all-female housing.
A survey of more than 500 students at five US universities found that they were 2.5 times more likely to admit to binge-drinking weekly.
They were also more than twice as likely to say they'd had at least three sex partners in the past year.
The findings, published in the Journal of American College Health, may not surprise students.
"A lot of the reaction we've been getting from students is, 'Well, we've known that,'" said researcher Brian Willoughby, who conducted the study while at the University of Minnesota in St Paul.
He said many universities around the world were moving away from the traditional notion that colleges should act as stand-ins for parents and enforce rules on students' social behaviour.
"This transition to co-ed housing has happened without an evaluation of its effects," he said.
Willoughby and colleague Jason Carroll found that more than 41 percent of students in co-ed housing said they binged weekly compared to less than 18 percent of those in single-sex dorms.
While 63 percent of students in single-sex housing said they'd had no sexual partners in the past year, this was true of only 44 percent of students in mixed dorms. Among students in co-ed housing, almost 13 percent said they had had three or more sexual partners in the past year, compared with five percent of students in single-sex dorms.
Willoughby said the findings did not appear to be a matter of "selection" - kids more prone to drinking and sex being likely to request mixed housing.
Few college students ask for single-sex housing, and most who end up in those dorms were simply placed there by their universities.
Willoughby and Carroll also surveyed the students on religion and personality traits such as impulsivity and extroversion, and found that those factors did not explain away the connection between mixed housing and drinking and sex.
Willoughby speculated that mixed-sex dorms may set different "social norms" than single-sex housing does. "It's not necessarily simply about women and men living together," he said. - Reuters
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