Does alcohol abuse lead to unprotected sex?
A psychology professor wants to know.
By Sarah Tuff ’95
Carlos Vélez-Blasini doesn’t hang out much at Mister Up’s or Two Brothers Tavern—or any other Middlebury bars, for that matter. You won’t find him at one of the College’s social houses and you certainly won’t find him hanging around any student parties. Yet the 41-year-old psychology professor knows more about the social proclivities of the typical undergraduate than anyone else on campus.
It’s a topic that may seem germane to anyone who has spent time on any of the more than 4,000 college and university campuses found in the United States. But, to Vélez-Blasini, it’s also a topic with a lot of unknowns—specifically as it relates to alcohol use and sexual behavior.
Simply put: Are college-age students more likely to engage in risky, unprotected sex when they’ve been drinking excessively? That’s something that Vélez-Blasini has aimed to find out—with a computer, a number of anonymous subjects, and a longstanding aptitude for deconstructing attitudes.
A native of Puerto Rico, Vélez-Blasini became hooked by social psychology as a freshman at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico. After graduating, he moved to the U.S. and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Vermont, where he began to examine how cultural expectations impact the behavioral effects of alcohol, a subject that stemmed from his own background. “Puerto Ricans tend to be extremely social and gregarious [while drinking],” he says. “In other cultures, there tends to be a strong expectation that alcohol makes you aggressive.”
In many circumstances, he explains, the way we behave has as much to do with what we expect from alcohol as it does with any biomechanical effect. Of course, certain situations, such as driving a car, fall outside this line of reasoning. No matter what you may expect, motor performance is impaired by alcohol. “But the impact that alcohol has on social behavior comes from expectations you have acquired,” he says. “And culture really does matter.”
Ask drinkers about social behavior and, well, one thing leads to another. “My goodness, there’s a very strong connection in people’s minds between alcohol and sexual behavior,” says Vélez-Blasini. “The two things go hand in hand—look at magazines, look at college movies like Porky’s, look at literature: ‘Candy / is dandy / but liquor / is quicker.’ There’s always been a sense that alcohol makes you want to have sex.” When surrounded by the undergraduate culture, the topic was almost unavoidable. “College students do a lot of drinking, and they have a lot of sex,” Vélez-Blasini says. “But how do you determine if they happen together?”
This question sparked the research that led to “Alcohol and sexual behavior with and without intercourse: factors associated with the decision not to have intercourse in potentially sexual situations,” a 35-page paper that may come as a surprise to many readers of top psychology journals. (Though the study has yet to be published, Vélez-Blasini’s work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.) Starting with a few initial questions in 2000, his study turned into full-scale data collection in 2004, and led him to challenge some long-held assumptions about alcohol and sex.
As Vélez-Blasini recounts in the introduction to his study, there is evidence to suggest that the more one drinks, the more one is likely to engage in sexual risk-taking. But Vélez-Blasini has long identified flaws in this “global” or correlational type of research. “You have no idea, are they having a lot of sex because they are drinking, or does it go the other way?” he says. “It’s just telling you that these things go together, not why they go together.”
Vélez-Blasini sought to examine more closely the effects of alcohol use on sexual behavior. Ideally, he would have conducted an experiment but, ethically, that wasn’t going to happen. So with the help of psychology major Will Rawson ’05, Vélez-Blasini devised a series of about 100 questions and posted them on a Web site. Since participation in research studies is a department requirement, the subjects for his study were 240 Middlebury students enrolled in various psychology courses.
The subject matter—intercourse, birth control, intoxication—might cause some to be squeamish. But, by conducting the study online, Vélez-Blasini was able to allow students to remain anonymous and complete the questionnaire on their own time. To avoid influencing results, he also avoided terms like “hookup,” instead dividing instances into potentially sexual situations (PSS) and actual intercourse (SEX).
If anyone can alleviate discomfort about such touchy matters, it’s Vélez-Blasini, says Molly Vaughn ’06. After spending her junior year studying in Spain, Vaughn chose Vélez-Blasini as her thesis adviser for a cross-cultural examination of the sexual-social behavior of college students. “He really helped in asking people personal questions so as not to scare them,” says Vaughn, who now works at the Vail Mountain School in Colorado. She is thinking about pursuing a graduate degree in psychology. “With-out his guidance, I don’t know if I would have finished my thesis.”
Vaughn adds that Vélez-Blasini’s upbeat personality was the perfect antidote for drowsiness during early morning classes. Indeed, when sitting in his Bi Hall office, it’s difficult not to be swept up in his infectious enthusiasm. Outside the classroom, Vélez-Blasini is a percussionist for the all-faculty band, The Doughboys; a husband to Nancy; and a father to nine-year-old Isabel. But he admits that this study has taxed even his seemingly limitless supply of energy. He compares the analysis of the complicated data to being the first to sort out the scattered constellations of stars in the inky-black sky—and he’s still trying to make sense of it all. One result, however, shines clearly. “The most surprising thing I’ve found,” Vélez-Blasini says, “is that students may actually be more prudent when they drink.” At least, more than one would think to be the case.
While alcohol use was reportedly much more prevalent during casual sexual behavior, it didn’t necessarily lead to unprotected sex among respondents. “Contrary to predictions, this result suggests that once sexual activity was initiated, alcohol was in fact associated with more, rather than less, prudent sexual behavior,” writes Vélez-Blasini in the study. “Promiscuity and sexual risk-taking, the current data suggest, may be more suitably explained by more stable [factors] like personality dimensions and behavioral tendencies.”
This finding, Vélez-Blasini says, should shift responsibility back to the individual. In other words, the excuse “I was drunk” just won’t wash.
Sarah Tuff ’95 wrote about the Middlebury Campus (“Stop the Presses!”) in the spring 2006 issue.