PROVO — Location, location, location. It's
not just important when buying a house or setting up a business. It
also may be an accurate predictor of risky behavior in college dorms,
according to a new BYU study.
The study of on-campus college housing environments found that
students who lived in coed rather than same-gender dorms were 2½ times
more likely to binge drink, more than twice as likely to have had
multiple sexual partners in the past year and more likely to use
pornography.
"What we're trying to say with this study is ... we really need to
look at housing environment and understand it," said Jason Carroll, an
associate professor in the School of Family Life and co-author of the
study, which will be published Tuesday in The Journal of American
College Health.
"This (co-ed) environment largely creates different expectations,"
Carroll continued. "What does it mean as you head down the hallway to
the showers, that there's going to be mixed gender? What does that mean
when there's that kind of proximity and association?"
The study surveyed 510 college students from five universities, not including BYU or any another Utah school.
They included two public universities in the Midwest and one on the
West Coast, plus a liberal arts college and an East Coast religious
university.
Carroll and lead author Brian Willoughby had previously identified
90 percent of U.S. college housing as now coed, a huge shift from 20
years ago, yet there's hardly any research on how that change has
affected students, Willoughby said.
Willoughby, Carroll's former student and now a visiting assistant
professor at BYU, said he believes the coed dorm environment leads
students to believe that binge drinking and sexual activity are going
on at higher rates than they really are, or that "everybody is doing
it."
"If they understand that not everyone is doing it, they're less likely to move toward that perceived norm," Willoughby said.
But as it stands, the study found that in coed dorms, 56 percent of
residents reported weekly drinking, versus 27 percent in
gender-specific housing. Binge-drinking differences were 42 percent in
coed dorms to 18 percent in the same-gender dorms.
Sexual attitudes were also far more lax in coed housing: 44 percent
said it was OK to "get together for sex and not expect anything
further," compared to 26 percent in the gender-specific housing.
These results were not because all the "party animals" lived
together, or because those with looser morals congregated in one spot,
Carroll said.
Quite the opposite, in fact, as the researchers learned that most
students didn't request where to live, but were simply placed in
housing by the university.
Other factors such as religiosity, age, socioeconomic status, family
background and dating history were all taken into consideration and
couldn't account for the differences in risky behavior.
Both professors are quick to say this study is not all-inclusive but
simply one step toward evaluating college housing and how it impacts
all students.
"There are a lot of efforts right now at universities to combat
binge drinking and risky sexual behavior," Willoughby said. "Hopefully
this study would give them one more thing to potentially look at."
E-mail: sisraelsen@desnews.com