How Much Is Too Much? Measuring Popular Conceptions of Drinking

knowledge about public attitudes toward, and definitions of, drinking problems (1-9). As in so many areas of social activity, the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the normal and the deviant, is not clear-cut. What factors lead observers to conclude that acceptable limits to drinking have been exceeded and that a person may be defined as having a drinking problem? In order to examine what factors affect perceptions of drinking problems, college students were presented with brief vignettes describing fictitious persons. Obviously, such features of the vignettes as amount of consumption and frequency of drinking are relevant to perceptions of seriousness. Other features investigated include such social characteristics as sex, age, and social class of the drinker, the personal and social consequences of the person's drinking, and knowledge of whether the person has sought treatment for alcohol-related problems. In this manner, a total of seven independent variables was manipulated by randomly assigning specific levels of each factor to  This article is a condensed version of Mr. O'Brien's M.A. thesis in Sociology, "From the use to the abuse of alcohol; a vignette study assessing the popular conceptions of seriousness of