The negative public health impact of binge and heavy drinking has been well established. That is, binge and heavy drinking are highly prevalent, particularly in college students, and there is a great deal of empirical support to link it to myriad negative social, health, legal and psychological consequences. Despite these facts, there is almost no work exploring the role that consequences might play in discouraging future drinking. Yet, consequences, the contexts surrounding them, and how they are perceived, are likely some of the more potent natural interventions that promote untreated decreases in binge and heavy drinking, as well as help-seeking behaviors. The lack of research and understanding of consequences as natural interventions may represent a critical barrier to progress in the field of intervention research and effectiveness because consequences often occur prior to treatment/intervention. Thus, the long-term objectives of the proposed research are to address this critical barrier by examining drinking consequences as natural interventions, to provide research training in these areas, and to make substantive contributions to alcohol intervention research that is translatable to practice.
The specific aims are to prospectively examine the co-prevalence of self-reported drinking and consequences in college populations, to examine whether there is a unique prospective effect of individual drinking consequences on subsequent drinking, and to examine how self-reported perceptions of the consequences, and other psychological factors (e.g., motivational stage of change) relate to consequences as interventions. To address these aims, the proposed research will be comprised of (1) a secondary analysis of a large prospective dataset of college students, and (2) a prospective, event-based survey of college students. The secondary analyses will answer all the questions as they relate to drinking each semester over the course of four years, and the event-based study will answer all the questions as they relate to acute changes in drinking each day over the course of a semester. Through gaining an understanding of how individual drinking consequences associate with later drinking, interventions to reduce problematic alcohol consumption can be improved. That is, there will be precise information about different drinking outcomes based on individuals'experiencing of consequences, and interventions can be developed that take individuals'experiencing of different consequences into account. Improvement of interventions would ultimately increase public health
| Martinez, Julia A; Sher, Kenneth J; Wood, Phillip K (2014) Drinking consequences and subsequent drinking in college students over 4 years. Psychol Addict Behav 28:1240-5 |
| Martinez, Julia A; Steinley, Douglas; Sher, Kenneth J (2010) Deliberate induction of alcohol tolerance: empirical introduction to a novel health risk. Addiction 105:1767-70 |
| Martinez, Julia A; Sher, Kenneth J (2010) Methods of ""fake ID"" obtainment and use in underage college students. Addict Behav 35:738-40 |
