Alcohol Consumption

College, for most students , is the first true glimpse of freedom. Freedom to what you want, and when you want. The research focuses on the choices made by students, seniors in particular, when it comes to drinking alcohol. Seniors were hard to contact through phone and knocking on their doors at Kalamazoo College. To get a sample, I distributed surveys through email from directories and asking seniors to take the survey in the library. In a total of 190 seniors from 10 majors/minors, i received only 57 responses. The survey hoped to answer the question of how a students makes the choice of what alcohol to drink, where to get it, and more importantly which factors play the largest part in this decision-making. Also if students are more likely to base decisions on price than brand name, are likely to consume more alcohol in general? Bases on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the least and 10 being the best. All of these questions, and the statistics that come from the results of these questions, can be useful for college-town bars and liquor stores in establishing marketing techniques. In analyzing the data from this study, it can be said that there are multiple factors that contribute to the decisions made in purchasing alcohol, drinks they had in the past week and how much they spend amongst the seniors of Kalamazoo College. The results of the survey did not show much correlation with our responses. The relation between family income and how much seniors paid for alcohol in the past week was a weak correlation and also comparing tastes of beer and liquor. Thus answering that there are not related to each other. Seniors, event though allowed to go to the bars, prefer purchasing alcohol at the store over the bar. Thus it would make sense for alcohol companies to target sales and specials at stores toward these students. Further, there is no significant difference between the drinking habits of men and women. A marketing plan focused just toward men in Kalamazoo College would be less beneficial than one that targets men and women equally. It was difficult to sample only a few seniors with a small seniors class than other schools that may have five times as more seniors here. Overall, of all the seniors that responded, individuals have different aspects of what beer or liquor they like and make their own decision of how much alcohol they want to pay.