Collaborator-designed agent-based models to inform alcohol-involved sexual violence prevention on college campuses.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PROJECT ABSTRACT Despite increased attention over the past decade, alcohol-involved sexual violence continues to be widespread on college campuses. Existing interventions, which include bystander training, education programs, and brief interventions, take an essentially global approach to the prevention of harmful alcohol use and sexual violence, and largely neglect the social and situational contexts in which drinking occurs. A combination of campus policies, behavioral interventions, and community-level interventions are likely needed to address this complex problem. Alcohol-involved sexual violence can be conceptualized as a system with feedback loops between various individual-level behaviors as well as between contexts and behaviors. Agent-based models (ABMs) are a methodological tool that can incorporate dynamics between behavioral, social, and structural environments and their impacts on hazardous alcohol use and sexual violence. They can be used to simulate the implementation of intervention(s) across a wide range of college campuses and populations. The usefulness of a given ABM, however, is limited by its accuracy, focus, and salience to end users. A stakeholder-engaged model-building process greatly enhances the relevance and usefulness of models that explicitly account for dynamic processes. The overall goal of this proposal is to create a stakeholder-designed ABM that can serve as a decision support tool to help campuses reduce alcohol-involved sexual violence among students. To achieve this goal, we will first develop a stakeholder-designed systems model of hazardous drinking, SV, and intervention opportunities on college campuses through a series of stakeholder-engaged model building sessions guided by a Core Modeling Team (Aim 1). We will leverage a learning collaborative of campus stakeholders including students, practitioners from health and counseling centers, Title IX coordinators, residential counselors, and so forth, from an ongoing alcohol-involved SV RCT involving 28 college campuses in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to recruit 60 student and non-student stakeholder experts to 6 stakeholder model building groups. The integrated systems model will be then translated into an ABM of alcohol use and sexual violence using an ABM platform with realistic synthetic populations that provides a population foundation for community-based simulations (The Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiologic Dynamics (FRED)) (Aim 2). We will then develop and assess the preliminary feasibility of stakeholder-informed, ABM- based decision support tools to optimize campus interventions to reduce alcohol-involved sexual violence (Exploratory Aim 3). This innovative, empirically-based approach, using stakeholder-engaged modeling to design an ABM and ABM-based decision support tools, can guide campus-level policy and programmatic changes, leading to improved implementation of effective strategies to address alcohol-involved sexual violence, promote prevention strategies among students, and stimulate campus-level policy changes.