Alcoholism in Young Adults

4 Pages 914 Words

Alcoholism in young adults and alcohol abuse is a growing problem in our
society. Daily, people are injured and killed in alcohol-related accidents and this has an
effect on each and every person as a result of these occurrences.
Whether we are personally involved or have directly suffered from the activities
of someone who is under the influence of alcohol, we all suffer from the negative
consequences of alcohol. Since we have those who choose to abuse these privileges we
need to develop consequences for them. By learning what leads people to drink alcohol,
and how this affects their lives, we can then determine what actions need to be taken to
help remove ourselves from our ever-increasing attraction to alcohol.
Because the abuse of alcohol often begins with adolescents and young adults,
most research is based around them. At this particular time in life we hope to find out
why these young adults choose to drink, and what motivates them to drink. Michael and
Rebecca C. Windle, in their research, were able to show several reasons that provided
incentives for adolescents to consume alcohol. Using a written survey, it was determined
that the high-school students being studied used alcohol to cope with problems in their
lives, including "task-oriented", "emotion-oriented", and "avoidance coping (Windle &
Windle, 1996, p. 551)." The only major discrepancies in results between the sexes
became obvious when it was shown by Windle and Windle that girls were more likely to
use alcohol for avoidance and emotion-oriented coping than were boys, but the boys were
more likely to have alcohol problems. Also found was that adolescents drank less often
for social reasons than for the aforementioned coping reasons (Windle & Windle, 1996).
However, coping motives were responsible for an increased consumption of alcohol. A
surprising result of this study was that the students drank more frequently as a result of
positive daily e...