Liquor Is Quicker: Gender and Social Learning Among College Students

Akers’s Social Structure-Social Learning Theory (SS-SL) has recently been criticized for dealing with social structural factors as exogenous variables rather than integrating them into propositions that specify the learning processes better. For example, Morash has argued that SS-SL has largely ignored the ways in which gender structures institutions, interactions, and behaviors and takes Akers to task for ignoring feminist theories. This research uses Core Alcohol and Drug Survey data from a subsample of White unmarried college students from eight diverse campuses throughout the United States to examine how conflict structured by gender affects differences in the use of alcohol before sex. The research specifically examines Akers’s claim that social learning variables (in this case, anticipated reward and risk of harm) will substantially mediate the effects of structural variables rather than modulate or moderate them. The policy implications of the research are discussed.