WWW: Coed Dorms Equal Sex and Drinking

In this edition of Weird World Wednesday, I submit to you a few excerpts from a Reuters article titled Co-ed dorms linked to more drinking, sex:

In a survey of more than 500 students at five U.S. universities, researchers found that students living in co-ed housing were 2.5 times more likely than those in all-male or all-female dorms to admit to binge-drinking on a weekly basis. They were also more than twice as likely to say they'd had at least three sex partners in the past year.
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In their study, Willoughby and colleague Dr. Jason S. Carroll found that more than 41 percent of students in co-ed housing said they binged on a weekly basis, versus just fewer than 18 percent of those in single-sex dorms.

And whereas 63 percent of students in single-sex housing said they'd had no sexual partners in the past year, this was true of only 44 percent of students in co-ed dorms. Of students in co-ed housing, almost 13 percent said they had had three or more sexual partners in the past year, compared with 5 percent of students in single-sex dorms.

Moreover, Willoughby said, the findings did not appear to be a matter of "selection" -- that is, kids who are more prone to drinking and sex being more likely to request co-ed housing.

Few college students specifically ask for single-sex housing, the researcher noted, and most that end up in those dorms were simply placed there by their universities.
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Willoughby speculated that co-ed dorms may implicitly set different "social norms" than single-sex housing does. Students, he explained, may expect co-ed dorms to have higher rates of drinking and sex, which may make them more likely to live up to those expectations.

It is interesting how we need "studies" like this to tell us things that we already know. Was anyone surprised by the outcome of the survey? Anyone think it weird that we need a study to state the obvious? What do you think about the study?