Peers as Family: Preventing Problem Drinking

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alcohol use among college students has been associated with unsafe sexual behavior, violence, and academic problems. Lack of parental monitoring and social pressure to drink may make undergraduates especially vulnerable to alcohol misuse. Undergraduate students may be particularly responsive to alcohol education given that they have not yet formed stable use patterns. This project will translate an effective AIDS risk reduction model, the Information-Motivation- Behavioral Skills model (IMB), to alcohol risk reduction using feedback from focus groups and a survey of students. Translational research will be sensitive to gender-specific alcohol use patterns and problems, and result in one generic curriculum suitable for both genders. Following this translational research, the revised intervention and evaluation tools will be administered in a demonstration project. The study design is a group randomized, controlled trial (RCT) of the IMB applied to alcohol risk reduction among 1,080, predominantly freshmen, students living in campus dormitories. Thirty wings (15 male, 15 female) within five residence halls will be randomized to a Control condition (n=360 students), Single-gender IMB condition (n=360 students), or a Mixed gender IMB condition. The IMB will consist of 3 2-hour workshops at the beginning of the fall semester. Workshops will include group discussions and activities, and the development of wing policy statements regarding alcohol. Alcohol use outcome measures will be obtained at the end of the fall and spring semesters by student self-report in web-based surveys. Survey outcome data will be supplemented with police (campus alcohol violations), registrar (academic problems), and Resident Life (alcohol-related emergency health events) data. Nested, longitudinal analysis controlling for demographic covariates will be used to test condition comparisons in outcomes over the academic year. It is hypothesized that risky drinking will be less among females in the Single gender IMB and males in the Mixed-gender IMB condition over time relative to the Control condition.