1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480703603321

Autore

Ven Thomas Vander

Titolo

Getting Wasted : Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard / / Thomas Vander Ven

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2011]

©2011

ISBN

0-8147-4441-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (230 p.)

Disciplina

362.292208420973

Soggetti

College students - Alcohol use - United States

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-205) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 .This Is the Shit Show! -- 2. Getting Wasted -- 3. Being Wasted -- 4. When Everything Falls Apart -- 5. The Morning After -- 6. Using Drunk Support -- Methodological Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go out drinking together. In Getting Wasted, Thomas Vander Ven provides a unique answer to the perennial question of why college students drink. Vander Ven argues that college students rely on “drunk support:” contrary to most accounts of alcohol abuse as being a solitary problem of one person drinking to excess, the college drinking scene is very much a social one where students support one another through nights of drinking games, rituals and rites of passage. Drawing on over 400 student accounts, 25 intensive interviews, and one hundred hours of field research, Vander Ven sheds light on the extremely social nature of college drinking. Giving voice to college drinkers as they speak in graphic and revealing terms about the



complexity of the drinking scene, Vander Ven argues that college students continue to drink heavily, even after experiencing repeated bad experiences, because of the social support that they give to one another and due to the creative ways in which they reframe and recast violent, embarrassing, and regretful drunken behaviors. Provocatively, Getting Wasted shows that college itself, closed and seemingly secure, encourages these drinking patterns and is one more example of the dark side of campus life.