The Social Functions of College Drinking: Pregaming, Priming, and Protecting the Liminoid Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study has concluded that, on average, one in three college students abuses alcohol regularly. However, while highlighting potential risks, academic literature largely neglects the social functions students derive from consuming alcohol. College represents an important milestone in an individual’s life and is characterized by what Turner (1969) called liminoid experiences, which involve a temporary suspension of social status, at bars, clubs, concerts, festivals, and college parties, often closely connected to alcohol consumption. This paper explores how women students’ practice of “pregaming,” that is, drinking alcohol in smaller groups before attending a social event such as a party, enables individuals to achieve the liminoid state while also providing opportunities to resist potential negative consequences of intoxication. College women use pregaming to build a support network with close friends, enabling them to ensure their physical safety. Beyond the integrity of their bodies, women also ensure that their actions during the liminoid experience of a college party are consistent with ideas they have of their personal identity. Although they temporarily suspend their social and personal identities during college parties, women prevent unwanted permanent changes of their sense of self by holding each other accountable to rules they establish during the pregame.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".