Liquer Its Not Good

It's just another Friday night, but this time it's the guy's night out.

What do many teenage boys have on their mind? They want to go cruising down the

highway at 80 miles per hour with the windows down. Find some beer, and some

women that they can get drunk, have sex with and have something to tell about

the next day. The sad thing is, that most of the time it is true. A survey was

taken in Nebraska in September of 1995, which said 25.7% of adolescents aged 18

and younger said, they have used alcohol before having sex. That is just in

Nebraska alone (Courtney, 288, 1995). It is also said that Fraternity and

Sorority members drink more and drink more frequently than their peers and

accept as normal high levels of alcohol consumption and associated problems.

Fraternity-sponsored parties also may encourage heavy drinking. Studies have

found that students who consider parties or athletics important and those who

drink to get drunk appear most likely to binge drink or to drink heavily

Although alcohol use by adolescents is frequent, alcoholism is very rare.

Still, alcohol consumption by adolescents hinders normal development. Alcohol

intake by children can result in learning impairment, hyperactivity, and

personality and behavior problems, because today's society has accepted the

casual use of alcohol. Among men, research suggests that

greater alcohol use is related to greater sexual aggression (Shalala, 1995, 2).

Students living on campuses with higher proportions of binge drinkers experience

more incidents of assault and unwanted sexual advances because of their peers'

drinking than do students residing on campuses with lower proportions of binge

drinkers (Shalala, 1995, 2). Some campuses sponsor alcohol awareness events and

classroom lectures and distribute information about alcohol use. Although such

education programs raise students' awareness of issues surrounding alcohol use,

these programs appear to have minimal effect on drinking and on the rates of

alcohol problems.

According to Donna E. Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services at

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, it seems that binge

drinkers appear to engage in more unplanned sexual activity and to abandon safe

sex techniques more often than students who do not binge drink (Shalala, 1995,

2). The purpose of this paper will prove whether or not Ms. Shalala is right or

wrong.

The first study was done in 1992. The purpose of this study was to

explore the relationship of alcohol use to unsafe sex in Latinas. The study was

conducted using telephone interviews. The interviews were conducted with 523

currently sexually active Latinas aged 18-49 years old. The telephone survey

employed a modified Mitofsky-Waksberg sampling technique to identify Latino

households in nine states with concentrations of Latinos ranging from 5 to 39%

in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Arizona,

Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Latinos in these states represent 77% of all

United States Latinos (MarÐ"­n, 1992, 1103).

The screening procedure involved identifying the ethnicity, gender, and

age of household members. Potential respondents were asked "Do you or any of the

members of your household consider yourselves to be Latinos or Hispanics?" An

eligible respondent in the household was selected using the Kish method, which

lists all adult household members and then uses one of 12 possible selection

schemes to randomly select among those eligible (MarÐ"­n, 1992, 1104).

Interviewers were bilingual males and females. Experienced interviewers

recruited respondents by telling them this was a national health survey and that

the topic was AIDS. Interviewers received specific training on how to ask the

highly personal questions used in this research (MarÐ"­n, 1992, 1104).

A response rate in survey sampling can be defined as the ratio of the

number of questionnaires completed of eligible elements to the number of

eligible elements in the sample. Businesses, faxes, and non households were

ineligible for reporting. After these were eliminated, age and gender of adults

in the household was determined for 67.1% of eligible telephone numbers. Also

86.4% of those contacted who met the requirements for the study provided

complete interviews. A response rate of 58% for the entire sample was obtained

(MarÐ"­n, 1992, 1104-5). The interviews were 100 open-ended calls, and two gender

exclusive focus groups with Latinos and Latinas in San Francisco. Its purpose

was to identify perceived consequences