A UW-Madison study shows college students who post about getting drunk on Facebook are more likely to have severe alcohol problems in the future.
Dr. Megan Moreno, assistant professor of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, led the study, which analyzed more than 300 randomly sampled Facebook profiles of University of Washington and UW-Madison underage undergraduate students.
""The findings help us say if you have a friend or a cousin or someone who's really posting about drinking dangerously there's a good chance that's actually happening,"" she said.
Researchers split students' profiles into three categories: Students who did not post alcohol references, students who posted alcohol references but did not mention intoxication and students who posted ""getting wasted,"" ""blacking out,"" or other terms linked with alcohol abuse.
Researchers then asked the students to participate in an online survey called Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test or AUDIT, which is used to identify and measure drinking problems.
According to Moreno, the results showed students who posted about dangerous drinking habits were more likely to have high AUDIT scores that suggest severe drinking problems.
According to Moreno, students who scored highest on the AUDIT test were six times more likely to have been injured in the last year due to alcohol than those who scored low.
Moreno said she was interested to find students who posted alcohol references without mentioning intoxication scored similarly on the AUDIT test to the rest of the country.
""I think [these findings] are really critical because it means every time you see an alcohol reference, you don't need to freak out,"" she said.
Alex DiTullio contributed to this report.
