Safer Colleges and Universities: A UC-System Evaluation

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Little progress of consequence has been made toward preventing drinking problems among college and university students. This is likely due to a number of weaknesses in the approach researchers take to studying the prevention of college drinking problems and that there is very little rigorous evaluation of prevention initiatives in the research literature. Too often, where evaluations are available, they involve one or two intervention sites, leaving open the possibility that their results may not generalize to other campuses. In the proposed 5-year study we plan to take the experiences gained by our and others' community prevention interventions to evaluate the impact of a comprehensive, community-based campus intervention. The project will involve eight campuses of the University of California in an effort to understand how educational and risk-management strategies may work alone and in combination in the context of a campus-wide prevention effort. The specific steps of the project would be to: 1. Establish a University of California system-wide advisory panel; 2. Conduct baseline research for student drinking and drinking problems that includes student survey and archival data collection from both the campus and its surrounding community; 3. Implement programs involving two primary strategies in an experimental design involving matched pairs of campus sites. One intervention will target students' misperception of drinking among their peers. The second intervention will be a comprehensive "environmental risk management" approach that focuses on clear and consistent policies addressing availability and promotion of alcohol, control of group drinking in both private and commercial settings, and increased effectiveness in monitoring and enforcement of those policies. The four experimental sites will implement both prevention programs in the second year of implementation while 4 comparison sites will be available over the course of the study; 4. Conduct a process evaluation with the goal of recording the actions taken by each campus, the policies and procedures adopted by it; 5. Finally, evaluate the program's impact on the frequency of intoxication, binge drinking, and prevalence of negative consequences as compared to the baseline and across the comparison campuses within the experimental design. Special attention will be paid to gender and ethnic differences in drinking behavior.