Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 121 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-121).

Thesis (Ed. S.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-175).

Thesis (M.P.A. )--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2004. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2939. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as 1 preliminary leaf (iii ). Includes bibliographic references (leaves 76-78 ).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (January 19, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-59)

The purpose of this dissertation study was to critically examine college student alcohol use in the context of the microenvironment of residence halls, the transition of the national minimum legal drinking age, and the attitudes and experiences of University of Iowa students who lived on campus from 1980 to 1995. The following research questions guided this study: 1) What were the attitudes and experiences of students living in the University of Iowa residence halls before, during, and after the change in the national minimum legal drinking age? 2) What were the individual experiences of students in the residence halls, in particular their alcohol behaviors? 3) What were students' attitudes towards policies and rules regarding alcohol? 4) How did non-residential students or staff members view student alcohol behaviors within the residence halls? 5) How might this information provide context and inform our understanding of the culture and environment we have on campus today? This study merged nested case study, historical methods, and oral history in order to address the research questions and best represent individual attitudes and experiences. Existing research on college student alcohol use and the influences of environment and peer groups, as well as the researcher's own background, informed and framed the study. Qualitative data sources for this study included nineteen participants, who were students, staff members, or administrators during the 1980s and 1990s. Guided interviews combined with artifact analysis were employed. Four over-arching themes emerged as a result of participants' attitudes and experiences provided during interviews: culture, residence halls, permissiveness, and sociability. Lessons learned include the importance of the culture and environment, the influence of residence halls norms, and the role of the university in shaping college student alcohol use. The national minimum legal drinking age transition seemed to affect few, if any, of my participants. My participants' attitudes and experiences during the time period of 1980 to 1995 did not depend on what year my participant was on campus in relation to the national minimum legal drinking age as all my participants faced similar experiences throughout the years of my study. The time period on campus was not as significant in shaping experiences as was the culture that had developed over time.

Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, state and federal lawmakers made a number of unprecedented changes to the minimum age laws that define the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood in the United States. By altering the voting age and the legal age of majority during the early 1970s, legislators effectively lowered the legal age of adulthood from twenty-one to eighteen, and launched a broader, more wide-ranging debate over other minimum age laws that would preoccupy legislators for much of the decade that followed. These reforms can be grouped into two distinct stages. Early 1970s reforms to the voting age and age of majority placed a great deal of faith in eighteen- to twenty-year-old Americans’ ability to make mature, responsible decisions for themselves, and marked a significant departure from the traditional practice of treating young people as legal adults at the age of twenty-one. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a second set of reforms revoked much of the faith that legislators had placed in the nation’s young people, raising some key minimum age limits – such as the drinking age – and expanding adults’ ability to supervise and control teenaged youth. This dissertation analyzes political and public debates over the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood during the 1970s, focusing in particular on reforms to the voting age, the age of majority, the drinking age, and the minimum age laws that regulate teenagers’ sexuality. It seeks to explain how and why American lawmakers chose to alter these minimum age laws during the 1970s, and how they decided which age should be the threshold for granting young people specific adult rights and responsibilities. The dissertation suggests that legislators often had difficulty accessing information and expertise that they could use to make well-informed, authoritative decisions on the subject of minimum age laws. Instead, they often based their choices on broader public images and perceptions of the nation’s young people, and on their subjective experiences of interacting with American youth. Throughout the 1970s, a wide range of lawmakers, activists, and interest groups – including many young people – sought to control the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood, both by lobbying lawmakers directly and by trying to alter public images and perceptions of the nation’s youth. During the early 1970s, some young activists, liberal lawmakers, and interest groups met with considerable success in their attempts to grant young people greater adult rights and responsibilities at earlier ages, successfully framing eighteen- to twenty-year-old youth as mature, responsible young people who were quite capable of shouldering adult rights and duties. But these positive perceptions of young people were short-lived. By the mid-1970s, they were being supplanted by much more negative and unsettling images of young people who were thought to be exhibiting “adult” behaviors too soon, and were portrayed as being both in danger and a danger to American society. As a result, lawmakers became increasingly focused on protecting and controlling young people in their late teens and early twenties, and on drawing clear, firm boundaries between childhood and adulthood. These shifts demonstrate that images and perceptions of American youth played a key role in shaping 1970s reforms to the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Rather than the product of a sober, careful evaluation of young Americans’ capacity to make responsible decisions for themselves, these reforms were often the product of adult Americans’ visceral, emotional responses to shifting public perceptions of the nation’s youth. / History

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-97).

The MA thesis "Minimum Legal Drinking Age in the U.S.: A Reasonable Exception to Age of Majority?" examines the U.S. legal limit for consumption of alcohol from the perspective of policies aimed at controlling drunk driving because the minimum drinking age was set to twenty-one - higher than the age of majority - in order to reduce drunk-driving fatalities. The thesis analyzes different aspects of this issue and concludes that the high minimum legal drinking, which constitutes a severe limitation of personal freedom of those aged eighteen to twenty, did not fulfill the expectations with which it was introduced in 1984. The thesis suggests alternatives to the high age limit, and examines how and if they are implemented or what prevents their frequent use. The thesis has four parts: one provides basic facts about drinking, driving, and drunk driving in the U.S. society including the attitudes of the public toward the issue. The following part looks into the legal developments of the drinking age limits and legal challenges to the law arranging the age limit for its supposed unconstitutionality. The third chapter looks at the results of scientific research and suggests ways to deal with drunk driving more efficiently. The last part examines what prevents these more effective measures from being widely...