Enhancing Quality in Protective Strategies

Plain-language summary

The most successful young adult alcohol or marijuana interventions involve the provision of accurate, nonjudgmental personalized feedback, but notably the inclusion and effectiveness of protective behavioral strategies (PBS) content is inconsistent. Moreover, active components of brief interventions are not well understood, and findings have been inconclusive regarding whether PBS mediates intervention efficacy of college student personalized feedback interventions (PFIs), with only some studies showing evidence of mediation. One possible reason for these findings is that investigators often do not know young adults' motivations for using (or not using) PBS or the quality of PBS use across individuals or across drinking occasions. The proposed study will provide an in-depth examination of which PBS young adults are motivated to use (including implementation quality) and reasons that young adults may or may not use PBS. Understanding why young adults are choosing not to use PBS on specific occasions or do not engage in effective or high-quality PBS use on certain occasions has significant clinical implications, whereby interventions may need to spend more time increasing motivations to use PBS in an effective manner or work on reducing perceived barriers (i.e., reasons individuals are not using PBS). Clinicians may then be better able to work with young adults in various settings to reduce or prevent excessive alcohol and marijuana use and related consequences. The proposed research has high potential for making a substantial impact on the field and public health (particularly as more states permit legal access to marijuana for those over 21) as it will address a problem of high importance (alcohol and marijuana use) by being the first to develop and refine a PBS intervention that specifically focuses on motivations for alcohol and marijuana PBS use and non-use as well as quality of use, which is an overlooked aspect of current PBS-related intervention approaches. The development of more efficacious interventions to reduce the proportion of young adults who engage in excessive alcohol use and who experience consequences is a key priority of the NIAAA. Related, development of more effective interventions to reduce risk from marijuana use is an area of great importance for the NIDA.

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