Undergraduate students' motivations to engage in sexual behaviors after consuming alcohol a mixed methodological action research approach /

by 1975- Green, Lauren Ashley

iii The study was developed to gain a better understanding of undergraduate students’motivations for engaging in sexual behaviors after drinking alcohol. There seems to be a gap between how researchers and administrators view and define college drinking, sexual behaviors, and motivations and the undergraduates’view of these behaviors. An action research approach was used in this study, to help bridge the gap between the researchers and the undergraduate students. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of students’motivations for engaging in sexual behaviors after consuming alcohol. In order to understand this, the following overall research question was posed: How do undergraduate students view drinking and then engaging in sex? To explore the answer in more detail, the following sub-questions were examined and compared by gender: What are the meanings of the terms students use to discuss these behaviors?, What motivations do students describe for drinking alcohol and engaging in sex?. To help answer these questions a quantitative survey instrument was developed to reliably and validly measure college student’s motivations for engaging in sexual behaviors after drinking alcohol. An action research approach to scale development was used. The answering of the research questions consisted of a three primary stages: q- methodology, content analysis of open-ended questions, and scale development. In the first stage of the study, q-methodology was used to categorize various motivations for alcohol consumption and engaging in sex as reported by undergraduate students on the Sex and Alcohol Log. In the next stage, information was collected, through answers to open-ended questions, to allow for a more complete understanding and clarification of iv undergraduates’motivations for engaging in sexual behavior after consuming alcohol and terms they use for describing those behaviors. A content analysis was performed on these data. The findings from the first two qualitative stages of this research process were then used to develop a scale that accurately represented the undergraduate students’ motivations for mixing alcohol and sex.