Website Prevention of College Binge Drinking

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application proposes a two phase project that will develop an Internet website intervention for the prevention and reduction of college student binge drinking. The internet intervention will employ motivational interviewing and normative feedback principles in its design, and will contain six modules that are oriented toward the prevention of binge drinking by college students. The core module in the Motivational Interviewing-Normative Feedback website (MI-NF) will assess participant alcohol use and normative perception. Based on the participant's response, the website will provide corrective normative feedback and a menu of advice and options for reducton of risky alcohol consumption patterns. In the first phase of the project, multimedia development research processes (including multimedia focus groups and iterative design improvement techniques) will be used to develop the website intervention. In the second phase of the project, a randomized efficacy trial of the website intervention will be mounted with two participating university sites. This design will provide a stringent test of the impact of the website on a variety of alcohol-related variables, and examine the use of interactive web technology by college students over their freshman year at university. The project carries several theoretical and methodological strengths, including extending effective MI-NF intervention techniques to a powerful and easily diffused electronic format, and employing a research design that avoids the limitations of previous research.