The extreme levels of drinking and associated problems observed among college students are """"""""rediscovered"""""""" every few years, most recently in the report of the NIAAA Task Force on College Drinking report """"""""A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges"""""""" (April 2002). Yet, despite this, little progress has been made toward preventing drinking problems within this important group of young people. The Task Force report, however, represents a potential major influence to reshape prevention efforts by virtue of its identifying recommended strategies on the basis of empirical research. Those recommendations include prevention focused on businesses that are licensed to sell alcoholic beverages (on and off-premise). In the proposed study we plan to take the experiences gained by our and others' community prevention interventions to evaluate the impact of a community-based intervention that would work with licensed outlets to 1) reduce the availability of alcohol to minors and 2) reduce service to anyone who is obviously intoxicated and therefore at risk of causing harm to themselves or others. The project would involve four hypothetical campuses (to be named as part of the cooperative agreement protocols) in an effort to understand how risk-management strategies in licensed outlets may work to reduce alcohol-related problems among students. These four campuses would then be compared to parallel data (from student surveys and obtaining archival data) being collected in comparison sites for an ongoing study. This quasi-experimental design will permit an evaluation of the program's impact on the frequency of intoxication, binge drinking, and prevalence of negative consequences as compared to the baseline and across the comparison campus.
| Saltz, Robert F; Welker, Lara R; Paschall, Mallie J et al. (2009) Evaluating a comprehensive campus-community prevention intervention to reduce alcohol-related problems in a college population. J Stud Alcohol Drugs Suppl :21-7 |
