TPC-Journal-V5-Issue3

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 3 356 Greek Life Housing The question remains as to how these results apply to the Greek system. Greek housing has been found to create an enabling environment for drinking (Ashmore, Del Boca, & Beebe, 2002; Borsani et al., 2009; Glindemann & Geller, 2003; Harford, Wechsler, & Seibring, 2002; Paschall & Saltz, 2007). There has been some movement toward fraternities establishing alcohol-free housing as a means of reducing risky drinking. Sororities have a history of providing alcohol-free houses, yet members still display higher levels of drinking than students who are not members of sororities (Ragsdale et al., 2012). In general, implementation of alcohol-free housing has not been found to reduce high levels of drinking (Crosse, Ginexi, & Caudill, 2006). In a study of one national college fraternity, Caudill et al. (2006) found that chapters that implement an alcohol-free policy have almost identical drinking levels compared to chapters that do not have an alcohol-free policy. However, fraternities continue to grapple with reducing the impact of alcohol use on their chapters in terms of issues such as the deterioration of living facilities and stabilizing rising liability insurance costs through the development of guidelines for alcohol-free fraternity housing (Whipple, 2005). Thus, there is limited research on whether there are any differences in drinking behaviors based upon type of Greek housing and whether decreases in drinking occur over time. Based on a quantitative study of an alcohol-free fraternity, Robison (2007) found that members joined for environmental factors such as cleaner living conditions, better academic conditions, the ability to separate home and party life, and friendships built on a common bond. Most of the members did drink but drank at different locations. The fraternity was able to maintain its membership through focusing on recruitment, promoting the benefits of environmental factors, providing social alternatives, focusing on brotherhood and friendship, and enforcing alcohol-related rules. Information was not provided for drinking levels, but through examining grade point average, Robinson stated that this fraternity consistently ranked in the top tier academically. However, by-products of alcohol consumption still occurred, such as disturbing the peace, vandalism and threatening behavior. In some cases, students created other opportunities for drinking, such as car bars, where members would park a car in a nearby location and drink from the car. Therefore, it would appear that dry houses have a different set of risk factors. As with some of the other descriptions of alcohol-free fraternities, information on level of drinking was not reported. Given that Greek membership is correlated with more negative consequences when members drink (LaBrie et al., 2011; Nguyen et al., 2011; Soule et al., 2015) and that there is a lack of research determining the differences in binge drinking based upon type of Greek housing and across an academic year, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the alcohol consumption of Greek houses (dry sorority, wet fraternity, dry fraternity) for two independent samples (fall and spring semesters). It is the policy of the National Panhellenic Council that College Panhellenic planned or sponsored events be alcohol free (National Panhellenic Conference, 2015). At this university, there were no sorority houses that allowed alcohol, but the inclusion of data on the drinking patterns of female members provides another aspect of drinking patterns of those involved in the Greek community. We hypothesized that members of dry sorority houses would report lower alcohol consumption than members of wet and dry fraternity houses for both fall and spring semesters, and that members of dry fraternity houses would report lower alcohol consumption than members of wet fraternity houses for both fall and spring semesters.