Buscemi,B, & Murphy ,J.G. (2010) Help-Seeking for Alcohol-Related Problems in College Students: Correlates and Preferred Resources Psychology of Addictive Behavior, Vol. 24 No.4,571-580
In the article Help-Seeking for Alcohol-Related Problems in College Students, the study examined the rates of past help seeking with heavy drinkers and likelihood to seek different forms of help under the hypothetical condition that they wished to change. In addition, it analyzed the characteristics associated with past engagement and likelihood in help seeking. In previous studies two published articles reflect self reported likelihood to seek help by specific alcohol intervention options. Published efforts have proven research had been limited to specific alcohol intervention options and correlates of either likelihood of help seeking or actual help-seeking among college students. Buscemi’s research extends previous research by examining college students’ self reported likelihood to seek help by a variety of specific alcohol intervention options and evaluating a variety of predictors of both likelihood to engage in and actual past use of these alcohol intervention options.
Although Buscemis findings are beneficial to Academic Institutions and the field of clinical psychology, the participants used in the study were not a fair representative of the populations to which the generalizations were made. The design of study included the correlation method to examine the association between reported likelihood of hypothetical help seeking on three domains (informal, anonymous, and formal) and variables related to alcohol consumption, alcohol problems, cognitive variables (motivation to change and discrepancy), and depression. To determine if the relations were related to the demographic variables correlations were computed between several demographic variables (gender, age, and ethnicity) and the help seeking likelihood ratings. The participants used in the study included 197 undergraduate students (54% female, 46% male) from a large metropolitan public university in the southern United States. The sample was ethnically diverse: 68.5% participants self identified as white Caucasian, 27.4% as Black/African American, 3.0% as Hispanic/Latino, 1.5% as Asian, and 0.5% as Hawaii/Pacific Islander and Native American. The sample was representative of the university in terms of gender and ethnicity, but included a disproportionate number of first year students (68.5%). Based on the statistics provided in the study, 68.5% of the participants identified as white Caucasian. As a result, the demographics were not reflective of a diverse population. Furthermore, the sampling size of the study was limited to one group of 197 students in a single university. Therefore the findings were generalized to the population and setting to hypothesize that students would prefer more informal help seeking resources over formal resources and that female gender, greater motivation to change, greater depressive symptoms, would be associated with the greater likelihood of help seeking and participating in past help seeking.
Heavy and regular alcohol usage can lead to addiction and alcohol abuse when users drink large amounts regularly and rely upon it to do things they would no otherwise be able to do without it. Eventually this self destructive pattern may lead to problems in their interpersonal relationships and decreased work performance
