Alcohol abuse among college students is a significant and long-standing public health issue, which exerts a substantial toll on individual students, institutions of higher learning, their neighboring communities, and society at large. While awareness of this issue has resulted in increased research and administrative efforts in campus alcohol policy and preventive intervention domains, large gaps in the extant knowledge base remain. For example, to date, virtually all empirically supported preventive interventions with college populations have focused on the individual drinker with little consideration of the larger environment. Additionally, very few preventive interventions have selectively targeted high-risk groups (e.g., """"""""Greeks"""""""") and fewer still have done so with an environmental focus. Further, it has been hypothesized that intensive on-campus policy/prevention policy/prevention efforts may be diminished by alcohol availability in the community or that these on-campus efforts may drive alcohol abuse into the community. Accordingly, there is a critical need to augment on campus policy and prevention efforts with environmentally based, interactive community interventions, esp. at institutions possessing sufficient infrastructure to support such initiatives. To these ends, the major aim of the proposed research is to extend environmental management (EM) approaches to both universal (community) and selected (""""""""Greek"""""""") populations. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of a coalition driven multi-stage EM change process in two municipalities (Specific Aim 1a) and two """"""""Greek"""""""" communities (Specific Aim 2a). We further propose to work with community (Specific Aim 1b) and """"""""Greek"""""""" coalitions (Specific Aim 2b) to implement and evaluate EM strategies related to alcohol access, policy/law enforcement, harm reduction, and marketing/promotion. Feasibility and efficacy aims will be evaluated across a diverse yet targeted array of survey, key informant interviews, observational assessments and archival data. The dual long-term objectives of this research are to provide college administrators with an enhanced armamentarium for reducing collegiate alcohol abuse while furthering the science of prevention.
