College Alcohol Environmental and College Drinking

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College drinking is one of the most significant and complex public health problems today. College students have the highest rate of heavy drinking compared to all other age groups resulting in an estimated 1,443 alcohol related injury deaths and 504,415 alcohol related nonfatal injuries annually. Despite the attention being paid to college drinking there are no studies that have looked at the role of the campus/community environment in terms of the physical and social availability of alcohol in predicting college drinking outcomes. The overall goal of the project is to evaluate the degree to which campus level factors affecting the availability of alcohol, influence individual student drinking patterns. It may be that the success of social norms marketing interventions are dependent on campus level factors, such that at campuses with high alcohol availability and/or weak alcohol enforcement, students are less likely to respond to corrections of misperceived norms. To test this hypothesis the project will partner with the Social Norms Marketing Research Project (SNMRP) funded by NIAAA (R01-AA12471) involving 32 intervention and control campuses. In Years 1 and 2 individual level data from the SNMRP will be merged with campus/community level data collected as part of this project. Campus/community level data will assess constructs thought to influence college drinking including: alcohol control policies, alcohol advertising and promotion, alcohol free options, alcohol enforcement practices, and alcohol outlet density. In Year 2 measures developed to assess the above constructs will be evaluated in terms of their power in explaining the between campus variance in individual drinking patterns. Preliminary analyses of SNMRP data suggest there is much to explain, since roughly 10% (i.e., ICC = .095) of the variance in drinking patterns is between campuses. In Year 3 measures found to explain the between campus differences in drinking patterns will then be incorporated in the evaluation of the ongoing social norms marketing intervention to test the primary study hypothesis. The project represents an initial effort at understanding the relative importance of campus/community level factors in impacting college drinking outcomes. Such knowledge is essential for the development of effective prevention efforts.