Fair comment, though I still maintain deep skepticism.

Some further thoughts on my experience: The colleges usually give you an option to sign up for the ‘loud’ dorms or the ‘quiet’ dorms, and these terms are usually proxies for more reserved/socially conservative and more adventurous/high risk.

In my ‘quiet’ dorm 4 guys downstairs/ 4 women upstairs, two of the men were immigrants from more reserved, socially conservative cultures. And my roommate was the high achieving, substance-free kind of kid, while I was a serious student. Upstairs, one of the girls was a socially conservative Catholic (who went home to visit her boyfriend on the weekend), and a girl who was dating a “Persian” guy at home and who was interesting in all things ‘Persian’ – culture, music, history etc. She was also learning to read and write Arabic, which in retrospect, makes me wonder about a Muslim angle (though the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ never came up). And then the other two girls were “geeks” who had no sexuality in their ’social constructs.’

I guess the point of this is to show that there are a variety of American sub-cultures -both secular and religious – that are natively resistant to bad behavior and value ‘good qualities,’ and a Muslim student would probably do well to seek out these other sub-cultures to find a comfortable mixed social space that will not inevitably devolve into debauch.

The conclusions seem obvious and uncontroversial based on my own experience.

Of course none of this means that everyone in a coed dorm is binge drinking and/or having sex.

I think challenging the study is good, but rejecting it simply because if comes out of a religiously affiliated university without any evidence that the particular researcher’s work has been found to be biased or not credible by other scientists is unfair.

Anecdotally, I was in co-ed dorms for two years and there was zero sexual or party activity going on. Some of the girls upstairs were sexually active, but they all had boyfriends back home and returned to them ‘religiously’ each weekend. It should be noted however that I choose to live in those co-ed dorms in the ‘quiet section’ of campus housing where the least amount of partying was going on.

Furthermore:

1) Some of this study makes absolutely no sense and my bs detector went off. Why would residents of co-ed dormitories watch more pornography than those in single-sex dormitories? Such an assertion does, however, make sense if you have preconceptions that co-ed dorms lead to random debauch and sinfulness….

2) The authors are all from or closely associated with Brigham Young University, ie, a bastion of Mormom conservatism that would strongly predispose them to these kinds of conclusions.

I will be consider these studies more seriously if they are conducted by researchers at other universities with a less religious pedigree.