By Matt Pederson
Huntsville Item Staff Writer
Many studies have been devoted to the harmful effects of
binge alcohol drinking among college students. But what
effect does moderate drinking have?
Ashley Nemer, an economics student at Sam Houston State
University, has spent the past two semesters working on
a research project regarding the issue. With the work now
complete, Nemer has concluded when done in moderation, drinking
has a miniscule effect on a student's grade point average.
"One alcoholic beverage per week will reduce your GPA,
on average, .003, which is really small," Nemer said.
"I'm not saying it's good for your health, but GPA-wise,
there wasn't a big cost for drinking."
One surprising element of her research revealed when asked
about how many drinks they had in the past week, 42 percent
of males and 55 percent of females said they had none.
Mark Frank, an economics and international business professor
at SHSU, was the advisor for Nemer's study. He said he was
very impressed with her work, especially, how concise and
thorough she was with her methods.
"For an undergraduate, it's amazing work that she did,"
Frank said. "I think it's a very nice sample, and the
sample really appears representative of the population of
Sam Houston State University, and I think the results are
actually a little bit surprising."
With help from a grant awarded by SHSU's economics honor
society, Omicron Delta Epsilon, Nemer and her research assistant,
Gabi Eissa took 1,200 individual samples, which is approximately
14 percent of the student population.
Her samples were gathered through surveys, where she asked
basic questions like a student's major, minor, GPA, classification
and gender, as well as recreational questions, such as how
many nights and how many hours they spent socializing and
how many alcoholic beverages they had over the past week.
"We would randomly draw an academic building and we
talked to everybody we could get ahold of," Nemer said.
"We tried to get 100 a week, sometimes more, sometimes
less."
Nemer became interested in the topic just out of her own
curiosity. She had been hearing from many people how damaging
alcohol can be to a student's grades and wanted to find
out for herself if there was any merit to this claim.
"I was very curious on how much everything that's actually
said about partying and socializing is true," Nemer
said. "One of my professors was doing a study on liquor
and that started the whole talk about it. It was something
that I thought would be relevant to college students.
"Everybody usually talks about binge drinking, but
we couldn't find any research, really, about moderate drinking.
What I'm trying to show is that if you are a moderate drinker,
it won't be detrimental, on average."
Nemer will be graduating from SHSU in May and will then
attend Oklahoma State University to pursue a PhD.
