...Change the drinking age to 18. When you are eighteen years old you have multiple responsibilities. Everyone who is eighteen is seen as a responsible, mature young adult. If eighteen year olds are portrayed as responsible and mature adults then why can’t they buy or consume alcohol? The legal drinking age should be lowered to eighteen because people are able to fight for their country, can be prosecuted as an adult, can buy cigarettes, and many more. One of the biggest issues on not being able to drink when you are eighteen is that they are able to fight for their country for freedom. They are able to hold, and shoot a gun, and possibly kill someone. Yet, they still can’t have a beer? Reynolds states “If you are old enough to enlist, and old enough to vote, you are old enough to swill cheap beer in the company of your peers."(n.p.) Military men and women have every right to drink and purchase alcohol if they so choose. Some people disagree with lowering the drinking age. They think it will cause more fatalities. People believe that someone who is eighteen is more likely to drink, and drive. I have no clue how people came up with this, but a twenty-one year old is just as likely to drink, and drive. Therefore, our roads won’t be any more dangerous than they are now, but Ogilvie states “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that raising the drinking age to 21 saves about 800 lives a year.”(n.p.) The thing is underage drinking is happening every day,...
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...Underage Drinking and the its Effects on the Economy In America underage drinking has many negative effects on the United States economy. Underage drinking cost the United States economy because of injuries, and or deaths resulting from drinking. Other incidents that cost the United States economy money are traffic accidents, school failures, or even unwanted pregnancies. In total underage drinking coast the United States 4.7 million every hour, 105 million every day, and above 53 billion dollars annually. With underage drinkers starting at thirteen to fourteen, the United States has seen an impact form underage drinkers at colleges all across the nation. With that being said in one year, there were 1400 student deaths, 500,000 injuries, and 70,000 cases of sexual assaults. The Center of Alcohol and Substance Abuse says that about 25 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the United States is from underage drinkers. In many cases, underage drinkers will become addicted to alcohol after they have started to drink the substance. Considering that drinking is one of the three leading causes of deaths in America, besides suicide and homicide, the United States needs to become more aware of this deadly abuse. At least 10.7 million people throughout the Unites States, between the ages of 12 and 17 drink an alcoholic beverage before they reach the age of 21. With this being said, the consumption of alcoholic beverages...
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...becoming normal. This drinking is happening mostly in the students’ dorm rooms on campus. Students are unaware of the negative effects of alcohol and usually participate in binge drinking, which for men is having more than five drinks in one occasion, and for women is having four or more drinks. In order to help prevent alcohol consumption, the colleges themselves must have guidelines in place to inform people about the dangers of alcohol. Strict alcohol rules such as complying with the 21 year old drinking age are also more hands on activities colleges can engage in to stop drinking. The Norming of Alcohol Consumption in College For many students, college is a new experience where they have to make their own decisions about their daily lives. For many students at first it is a difficult adjustment to move away from family and friends and have to deal with this. With this newly found freedom more and more students will consume alcohol on a regular basis. According to the University of Villanova, “Nationally, a very large majority, about 80 percent, of college students uses alcohol” (Villanova). This drinking is mostly happening on the college campuses inside of the students dorm rooms, or at another place on campus. Though colleges do not endorse drinking for students under the legal drinking age, students find ways to access alcohol. Non-serious alcohol consumption for students is usually classified as having four drinks or fewer during one occasion of drinking. However, other...
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...Why Drinking and Driving is not a good idea. “It is ok; let’s have one drink on the way there” a commonly used phrase in American culture. It has only been within the past 20 years that as a nation, we have begun to recognize the dangers associated with drunk driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this year 519,000 people, or one person per minute, will be injured in alcohol-related accidents. 10,839 people will die in drunk-driving crashes this year – that is one death every 50 minutes. The heartbreaking part is every injury and lost life due to driving after drinking can be prevented. Drinking while driving “accidents” are not merely “accidents.” Getting in a vehicle after consuming alcohol, which severely affects the function of the brain, is not an accident. It is lack of responsibility. Individuals that consume alcohol irresponsibly must begin to take responsibility for themselves and for other innocent drivers on the road. Unfortunately, in spite of great progress, alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious national problem that tragically affects many victims annually. An organization named MADD was created after the daughter of a lady was killed because of an intoxicated driver, he got jail time and suspended license, and however he got released from jail 2 years after he was locked up in jail. There are many organizations that have been formed now to fight these terrible acts and hope to punish the ones who deserve to stay in jail...
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...HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY Health psychology is defined as the application of psychology to the relevant areas of health, disease and the health care system. Medicine and health psychology have many common themes and interests but they differ in their approaches. The primary focus of medicine is the diagnosis, treatment and cure of illness. The focus of health psychology goes beyond that of medicine to stress the prevention and enhancement of health. It expands the biological framework of medicine to also include psychological and social factors. The scope of health psychology is very broad because many theories and methods of psychology can be applied to health-related issues. Maes & van Elderen (1998) (cited in Gross, 2009) defines health psychology as “…a sub-discipline of psychology which addresses the relationship between psychological processes and behaviour on the one hand and health and illness on the other...”. Health psychology aims to understand, explain, develop and test theories by evaluating the role of psychology and its perspectives as factors affecting illness, predicting unhealthy behaviours and understanding and evaluating the role of psychology in the experience and treatment of illness. It also aims to put theory into practice by promoting healthy behaviour, preventing illness and thereby improving the health care system and health policy. For example, from programmes developed to help people reduce risk factors to their health, such as obesity and...
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...advantages and disadvantages with the following: o Rating and ranking scales o Likert scales o Unidimensional and multidimensional scales (2) Consider the way you operationalized the variable “binge drinking” in Week 1. Now, using one or more of the scales noted in (1) above, create two questions you might use in a study about binge drinking. Make sure you include the answer scale you would want the participant to use as well. Make sure if you quote or paraphrase a source that you use proper APA citation and referencing. Week 4 – DQ 1 Post a 200-300 word response to the following discussion question by clicking on Reply In business research we often will need to create measurement instruments for the variable(s) we want to understand. Remember in Week 1 we start our research design process by trying to create a useful definition of a concept or variable we might study. Once we have a workable “operational definition” of all our variables we are ready to create the measurement system we will use. This week: (1) Please discuss the advantages and disadvantages with the following: o Rating and ranking scales o Likert scales o Unidimensional and multidimensional scales (2) Consider the way you operationalized the variable “binge drinking” in Week 1. Now, using one or more of the scales noted in (1) above,...
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...Alcohol consumption poses a threat for many public health harms. Impaired driving is one of the largest contributors to motor vehicle crashes (Burris, Grunwald, Anderson, &ump; Filippoli, 2011). In the United States each year roughly 13,400 people die and an additional 255,500 are injured in motor vehicle crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver according to Burris et al., 2011. In 2006, these crashes accounted for almost a third of all U.S. traffic-related deaths (Burris et al., 2011). Alcohol is the most commonly abused substance in the United States according to Pandrea, Happel, Amedee, Bagby, &ump; Nelson, 2010, and studies show that reducing alcohol consumption can lead to public health improvements such as decreased incidence of “liver cirrhosis, delirium tremens, male suicide, criminality, hospitalizations, alcohol-related disease mortality, workplace injuries, STDs, IPV, rape, robbery, and severe violence towards children” (Jernigan). Public heath deals with many other issues that cause burdens to individuals and society alike such as obesity and gun use. Over the past several months, headlines in the news have been echoing “Chocolate Milk Removed from School Lunches,” and “Senate Considers Federal Tax on Soda.” While the removal of chocolate milk from school menus has actually happened in certain school districts across the country, federal tax on sodas has only been a proposal at this point. However, both echoes resounding through the news originated from escalating...
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...Underage Drinking Topic: Underage Drinking in College Settings General Purpose: To provide a solution to an ongoing problem Specific Purpose: To provide a solution to underage drinking in college settings Central Idea: To provide a solution to the audience and encourage them to make a change Introduction: I am here today to tell you about an ongoing problem that occurs on our own school campus more often than not. This is our school. These are underage students who attend our school. What happens when you add alcohol to the mix? Well, first, you get throw up. Then, you get angry administrators. I’m here today to address the issue of underage drinking on college campuses. I am also here to provide a solution to this problem that will not only make us, the student population, happy, but also provide college campuses with less disciplinary problems. Body: (Transition: First, let us take a look at the amount of underage college students consuming alcoholic beverages.) I. This graph represents the amount of students who reported getting drunk within the past two decades at the University of Michigan. A. As you can clearly see, this graph shows that anywhere from 38-48% of students have REPORTED being drunk in their college career. It does not include the students who are too afraid to admit to participating in “Thirsty Thursday” and extracurricular weekend activities. B. What the graph does also not show is how many of these students are of age, and how many are not...
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...INFORMATION: Yanovitzky, Itzhak, and Jo Stryker. "Mass Media, Social Norms, and Health Promotion Efforts: A Longitudinal Study of Media Effects on Youth Binge Drinking." Communication Research 28.2 (2001): 208-39. ProQuest. Web. 3 Sep. 2013. * TOPIC/THEORY: The article is about the effects media has on society’s perception of binge drinking among young adults. “The study examines the validity of a norm-reinforcement approach as a complementary model to direct media effects on health behavior change.” The ideodynamic method and a time-series regression were applied in this experiment. * RESEARCH QUESTION OR PROBLEM: The study was conducted to see if media’s efforts to persuade youth to stop drinking are effective. As stated in the article, alcohol is the most widely used and abused drug among youth in the U.S. The authors set out to address two concerns. First, the believability of the norm-reinforcement approach compared to other paths of media effects on health behaviors. Second, the credibility of a direct or indirect path from media representations of risky behaviors compared to social expectations. * METHOD: The researchers considered four factors in order to test their theory. First, they surveyed high school seniors on their views of drinking. Second, they looked at news coverage of binge drinking between 1978 and 1996. Those newspapers were chosen to represent coverage of alcohol abuse in the national media environment. To avoid sampling errors, they tested...
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...Why Do People Drink? Kenyatte Speller SSCI210 Individual Project 1 Dr. Douglas McCoy American Intercontinental University Abstract According to sociologist, C. Wright Mills, people often believe that their private lives can only be explained in terms of their personal successes and failures. People fail to see the common relationship between their own individual lives and the society around them. The process of interpreting your individual life in the context of your community or the society in which you live is called sociological imagination. Being an alcoholic would be an addiction in itself. Why do people drink? “There's not alcoholic in the world who wants to be told what to do. Alcoholics are sometimes described as egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Or, to be cruder, a piece of shit that the universe revolves around.” ― Anthony Kiedis The sociological imagination is about understanding how society, quality of mind that allows someone to see history and biography and the relations between the two within society. The most important part of this that social life have meanings for individual which affect the values, character, and the behavior of people who help make up the sociocultural system. Sociological really need to have reason to bear on human affairs and to get the role requires that people avoid furthering bureaucratization of reason and discourse. People have to own up to their own issues and troubles. Sociological Imagination is awareness of...
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...a younger age they learn how to monitor and control their drinking. Some of the reasons Canadians believe its okay are; they are less likely to see alcohol as a badge of adulthood and rebellion. Allows them to learn their limits in a safe space may also help ward off risky experiments in more dangerous settings later. By allowing 19 year olds do it makes alcohol illegal for high school students but allows virtually all college kids to legally drink. This means that at least some of their drinking is supervised and that there is no incentive to binge to avoid being caught possessing alcohol. The lower legal drinking age means that more Canadian students drink than American students; however, those who imbibe display more moderation than their U.S. counterparts (Larry Hemelin, 200). Even thou Canadians believe that the age of 19 is the right legal age for youngster to start drinking, many activists are still pushing new laws to raise the age limit for drinking alcohol. There are programs that are pushing to stop underage drinking. Awareness is being publicized in many ways. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) are exposing driving drunk reports to bring more awareness to everyone from different ages, and hopefully reduce drunk driving and change the drinking age (Denise Dubyk, 2011). Nonetheless, the media and some activist groups, government agencies and foundations constantly promote the idea that most teen drinking is extremely risky and carries a high probability of causing...
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...Brian Basic Should the Drinking age be reduced? The drinking age goes way back in history. Drinking began to be considered a problem around the 1900’s. When the government decided to pass the 18th amendment in 1919 alcohol became prohibited throughout the United States. This amendment forced all alcohol underground. The crime rate started to rise drastically throughout the country. The crime rate rose because people were buying and selling alcohol illegally. As a result of all the problems evolved, in 1923 the 23rd amendment repealed the 18th amendment abolishing the banning of alcohol from the United States. That established the modern drinking age, but the age was not the same in all of the states. The states government had the freedom of being able to assign what they felt were a good age for people to start the consumption of alcohol. Most of the states chose the age of twenty-one, but several states allowed the purchase of beer to be at eighteen. "The political failure of general Prohibition meant that American adults would increasingly focus justifications for alcohol policy less on the perils of drunkenness and more on the tenuous concept that adults can drink properly but youths cannot or should not" (Males 190). This lead to much discussion over the drinking age and the debate will go on for years to come. Throughout this debate, it lead to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which lowered the United States drinking age to eighteen. After this act...
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...The social issue I picked to write on is drunk driving, which in today’s society has become a huge issue. Back when I started driving, drunk driving was not looked upon the same as it does today. People who were involved in an alcohol related crash or accident were usually not punished like they are today. Along with that driving under the influence carried a well less penalty then it does today. Driving under the influence of alcohol is one of the most dangerous things you can do. There is a mass of information out there on how alcohol affects your body pertaining to driving. Excessive drinking has become a bigger problem in today’s world not only with college kids but with older people to. For example according to Tara Parker Pope (2012) “New research shows that four times a month, one in six Americans goes on a drinking binge, knocking back an average of eight alcoholic beverages within a few hours.” Society’s views on drunk driving have changed a lot due to awareness of it and the effects it has on people and families. It affects society in a huge way with the fact that a lot of people die every year from being hit or hitting someone else in a drunk driving accident. Every year thousands of people are involved in an alcohol related accident, which effects many people from their family and friends to the people they got in an accident with. Drunk driving as a whole effects the whole society, at some point in your life you will of known someone who either was seriously hurt...
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...Suppose the government raises the legal drinking age in the UK from 18 to 21. Conduct an economic analysis of this policy to examine its impact on affected markets. The minimum legal drinking age or MLDA is the most well studied alcohol control policy. It is a controversial problem with different empirical studies showing opposite results. In my opinion the change of age from 18 to 21 will lead to lower demand and will cause prices to go up. The consumption of alcohol affects the economy in opposite ways- every beverage sold raises the welfare but the problems coming from alcohol (deaths, injuries, crimes and reduced workforce productivity) lowers welfare. The change of the MLDA is an answer to the question whether the economy is better off with more drinking or not. There are many studies some saying that the raise of the MLDA is going to cause more drinking. A very important thing that we mustn’t forget is the credibility of these studies. They have been carried out most of them in the 1970s and 80s and all of them in the USA. We need to consider that in the past people perceived things differently and results may not be the same today. Besides the studies were carried out in the USA which has a different culture than the UK. According to Phillip Huff (http://www.scribd.com/doc/31945082/The-21-Year-Old-Minimum-Legal-Drinking-Age-An-Economic-based-Analysis-of-Problems-with-the-MLDA-and-Potential-Solutions, page 2) the law as it is now is causing the loss of billions of dollars...
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...Under the Influence Growing up people learn not only when to drink alcohol, where to drink, what types to drink, but also how to act when they drink by a process called socialization. Many experiments have been done and have proven that people in diverse cultures act differently when drunk. For instance, some cultures believe alcohol causes violence, so they often become violent; some think alcohol makes them feel romantic, so they often get sentimental; and still others assume that alcohol causes them to feel free, so they often open up emotionally. Social interaction, whether one realizes it or not, teaches us how to act when we are drunk. It has been said, “If behavior reflects expectations, then a society gets the drunks it deserves." Many factors of culture alone can completely shape the ways in which people act when they have been drinking. Race, gender, sex and age are just some of the factors that can alter the way people view drunken behavior. For my paper, I will show how age has a huge affect on drinking behavior. Do twenty-one year old adults and forty-one year old adults have the same motivation to drink? Do they act differently when they do get drunk? Through research and observation, I will show that age does have a huge impact on the way people act when they decide to consume too much alcohol. Jane, a twenty-one year old student, is an average woman who tries to spend time with her friends when she is not studying calculus or working at a local restaurant...
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