A Randomized Trial to Evaluate Project ARM

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This study will evaluate effects of the Alcohol Risk Management (ARM) program, a well-developed, four-session training program for owners and managers of on-sale alcohol outlets (i.e., bars, restaurants). This on-one-one training program is designed to provide managers with the knowledge and skills necessary to develop responsible, outlet-specific alcohol service and promotional policies. By influencing establishment policy, the ARM program attempts to reduce illegal alcohol sales to obviously intoxicated patrons and decrease alcohol promotions that lead to heavy consumption of alcohol, which are related to public health problems such as violence and traffic crashes. The study proposes to conduct a full, randomized trial to evaluate effects of the ARM program on: (1) propensity of outlets to sell alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons, (2) implementation of internal outlet policies (as measured through a telephone survey of owners and managers), and (3) rates of alcohol-related problems (as measured through police call data). Two hundred on-sale establishments (i.e., bars, restaurants) will be randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions (i.e., 100 per condition). Actors displaying obvious signs of intoxication will attempt to purchase alcohol in intervention and control outlets at baseline and three and six months after implementation of the ARM program. Control outlets will receive a one-session, less-intensive version of the ARM program (ARM Express) after the six-month follow-up of pseudo-intoxicated purchase attempts. Two secondary goals of the study are to assess the promise of ARM Express for influencing establishment policies and decreasing alcohol-related problems and to evaluate differences between participating and non-participating outlets.