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August 11, 2008New Study Shows Reductions in Serious Alcohol-Related Consequences Among College Students |
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From Ascribe Newsfeed: A new six-year study conducted at the University of Virginia has found that exposing college students to information that corrected misperceptions about campus drinking patterns resulted in dramatic reductions in alcohol-related negative consequences. The study is reported in the July-August edition of the Journal of American College Health by Dr. James Turner, executive director of student health at U.Va.; Jennifer Bauerle, director of the National Social Norms Institute at U.Va., and H. Wesley Perkins, professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. embarked on a social norms marketing campaign to better inform first-year students about drinking behaviors as reported in student surveys. Social norms marketing is an approach that communicates accurate information about the prevalence of healthy behaviors and attitudes among peers. Once the marketing campaign had been launched, Turner and his colleagues began surveying students who had been exposed to the campaign about 10 alcohol-related consequences, from missing class to having unprotected sex to getting in trouble with police. Over the six years of the study, students' odds of experiencing none of 10 alcohol-related consequences nearly doubled and multiple consequences decreased by more than half for all undergraduate students. First-year students exposed to the campaign reported a 22 percent reduction in the odds of experiencing multiple negative consequences and a 24 percent reduction in the odds of having an estimated blood alcohol content of greater than .08 the last time they partied. These observations, the authors note, contrast sharply with national surveys of college students that report either no decrease or a slight increases in seven negative consequences between 2001 and 2005.
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