JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Hazardous drinking among college students persists, despite ongoing university alcohol education and harmful drinking intervention programs. College students often post comments or pictures about drinking episodes on social media platforms.

Objective:

We sought to understand the real-time contexts of student drinking that are shown on social media platforms, and to identify opportunities to reduce alcohol-related harms and inform novel alcohol interventions.

Methods:

We analyzed social media posts from 7 social media platforms using qualitative inductive coding based on grounded theory to identify the contexts of student drinking, and the attitudes and behaviors of students and peers during drinking episodes. We reviewed publicly available social media posts that included references to alcohol, collaborating with undergraduate students at one university to select their most-used platforms and develop locally-relevant search terms. We coded text and visual posts for explicit and implicit alcohol use, classified them as positive, neutral, or negative, and analyzed the frequency of each code. From codes, we derived themes about the student culture around alcohol use.

Results:

A total of 1,151 social media posts was the sample for this study. These included 809 Twitter tweets, 113 Instagram posts, 23 Facebook posts, 8 YouTube posts, 64 Reddit posts, 34 College Confidential posts, and 100 Greek Rank posts. Posts included implicit and explicit portrayal of alcohol use. Across all types of posts reviewed, we found that positive drinking attitudes were most common, followed by negative and then neutral, but valence varied by platform. Posts that portrayed drinking positively received positive peer feedback, and support the idea that drinking is an essential and positive part of student culture.

Conclusions:

Social media provides a real-time picture of students’ behavior during their own and others’ heavy drinking. Posts portray heavy drinking as a normal part of student culture, reinforced by peers’ positive feedback on posts. Interventions for college drinking should help students manage alcohol intake in real-time, provide safety information during alcohol use, and raise awareness of online privacy concerns and reputation management. Additional interventions for students, alumni, and parents are needed to address the impact of positive attitudes about and traditions of drinking.