Alcohol Intervention for First Year College Students

Plain-language summary

While a large focus of research on U.S. college drinking has focused on the prevalence of and problems related to heavy-episodic drinking, less has focused on college students who are either abstainers or lighter drinkers (i.e., for men, drinking 4 or fewer drinks in two hours and 14 or fewer drinks per week; and for women drinking 3 or fewer in two hours and 7 or fewer drinks per week). Over 40% percent of college students ages 18-22 do not report drinking in the past month with only half of those engaging in regular heavy-episodic drinking. Research suggests that a significant proportion of students who were abstinent or light drinkers prior to and upon entering college initiate drinking and progress to becoming heavy-episodic drinkers. This provides evidence that the first few months of college is a high-risk time for initiating both drinking and heavy-episodic drinking and that delaying the onset of heavy-episodic drinking among light drinkers and abstainers should lead to reduced harms throughout the college years and young adulthood. Mobile phone-based interventions are an innovative method for reaching young people and have been established as an empirical approach towards addressing health issues, including alcohol use. The ultimate goal of this proposal is to develop, refine and pilot a text message (TM) intervention for abstainer and lighter drinking first year college students with the ultimate goal of delaying alcohol initiation and/or reducing alcohol use escalation. An iterative process of focus groups, intervention content development, and user feedback focused on the unique experiences of abstainers and lighter drinkers will inform the TM Intervention to be delivered in a pilot study with 6 weeks of TMs. The pilot study will include a 6 week post-intervention assessment, and 3, 6, and 9 month follow-ups among 100 incoming first year abstainer and lighter drinker college students. Given that reducing young adults' and college students' engagement in excessive alcohol use has been listed as a major objective of Healthy People 2020 and a key priority of NIAAA, an intervention that focuses on delaying alcohol initiation and escalation into higher-risk alcohol use among abstainer and lighter drinkers could make important strides to achieving this goal.

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