Students who study abroad drink twice as much as students who choose to stay home, according to a study by the University of Washington.
The study looked at the drinking habits of 177 students studying abroad in five regions: Oceania, Asia, Europe, Latin America and what the researchers call “non-traditional” study-abroad regions, such as South Africa, India and Jordan.
Students increased their drinking from four to 10 drinks per week in Europe, from three to five drinks in Asia, and from five to 11 drinks in Latin America, according to researcher Eric Pederson, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of Washington.
“We found that students who went to Europe or Oceania increased their drinking to a greater extent than students who went to other regions,” he said.
Pederson added that students in non-traditional regions actually decreased their drinking from four to 2.5 drinks per week.
“This is something we don’t have data on, but I’m sure a lot of it has to do with cultural factors,” he said.
That is the case in Scotland, according to Cara Stern, a Carleton University journalism student currently on exchange at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
“I noticed that here, sometimes my flatmates will have a drink with dinner or while we’re hanging out together, even if they’re the only one. I never really saw that with the people I lived with at Carleton,” she said.
Stern, 21, said she’s noticed a slight increase in her own drinking habits.
“There is a bigger drinking culture here than there is back home and there are probably more opportunities than there are back home, but I don’t really think it’s two times as much.”
Students involved in the study filled out a survey on their drinking habits prior to departure. Once they returned, they filled out a survey asking about a week in their first week abroad and a week in their third month abroad.
“Unfortunately that’s a limitation to the design, some of them had to go back quite a few months to think about what their drinking was like,” Pederson said.
Even a year later, Derek Wong remembers the change in his drinking habits.
The fourth-year biochemistry student at the University of Western Ontario said he drank two to three drinks on average per week before his departure for Leeds University in England.
While there, he said he raised his weekly drinks to approximately seven per week, a change he calls a “dramatic increase.”
“I believe in Europe drinking is seen as more normal part of people’s lives than it is in North America,” Wong said.
But people don’t need to worry about drinking abroad just yet, according to Pederson.
“I don’t think you could say at this point that it’s alarming,” Pederson said. “I think what you’ll find is students get in trouble on campus too.”
Pederson said the issue was still being explored.
“We definitely need to do a little more research. If it’s all in one night and people are getting into trouble . . . then maybe that would be more of a red flag.”