Evaluating a comprehensive campus-community prevention intervention to reduce alcohol-related problems in a college population.

OBJECTIVE: This article evaluates Western Washington University's Neighborhoods Engaging with Students project-a comprehensive strategy to decrease disruptive off-campus parties by increasing student integration into and accountability to the neighborhoods in which they live. The intervention includes increasing the number of and publicity regarding "party emphasis patrols" and collaboration with the city to develop a regulatory mechanism to reduce repeat problematic party calls to the same address. The enforcement components are complemented by campus-based, late-night expansion programming, as well as neighborhood engagement strategies including an educational Web site designed to increase students' knowledge of and skills in living safely and legally in the community, service-learning projects in the campus-contiguous neighborhoods, and a neighborhood-based conflict-resolution program. METHOD: The evaluation comprised data from three public universities in Washington. In addition to the Western Washington University site, a second campus created an opportunity for a "natural experiment" because it adopted a very similar intervention in the same time frame, creating two intervention sites and one comparison site. Annual, Web-based student surveys in 2005 and 2006 included measures of alcohol consumption, alcohol-related problems, and student perception of alcohol control and prevention activities. RESULTS: Although statistical power with three campuses was limited, results using hierarchical linear modeling showed that the prevalence of heavy episodic drinking was significantly lower at the intervention schools (odds ratio = 0.73; N = 6,150 students). CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that alcohol control measures can be effective in reducing problematic drinking in college settings. These findings strongly support conducting a replication with greater power and a more rigorous design.

Personalized mailed feedback for college drinking prevention: a randomized clinical trial.

The current study was designed to evaluate the efficacy of a mailed feedback and tips intervention as a universal prevention strategy for college drinking. Participants (N = 1,488) were randomly assigned to feedback or assessment-only control conditions. Results indicated that the mailed feedback intervention had a preventive effect on drinking rates overall, with participants in the feedback condition consuming less alcohol at follow-up in comparison with controls. In addition, abstainers in the feedback condition were twice as likely to remain abstinent from alcohol at follow-up in comparison with control participants (odds ratio = 2.02), and feedback participants were significantly more likely to refrain from heavy episodic drinking (odds ratio = 1.43). Neither gender nor severity of baseline drinking moderated the efficacy of the intervention in these analyses, but more conservative analyses utilizing last-observation carryforward suggested women and abstainers benefited more from this prevention approach. Protective behaviors mediated intervention efficacy, with participants who received the intervention being more likely to use strategies such as setting limits and alternating alcohol with nonalcoholic beverages. Implications of these findings for universal prevention of college drinking are discussed.

Engaging men as social justice allies in ending violence against women: evidence for a social norms approach.

The field of sexual assault prevention is shifting attention to educational interventions that address the role of men in ending violence against women. Recent studies document the often-misperceived norms men hold about other men's endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes and behaviors. The authors provide further evidence supporting the design of population-based social norms interventions to prevent sexual assault. Data from this study suggest that men underestimate the importance that most men and women place on consent and willingness of most men to intervene against sexual violence. In addition, men's personal adherence to only consensual activity and their willingness to act as women's allies are strongly influenced by their perceptions of other men's and women's norms. These findings support the proposition that accurate normative data, which counters the misperception of rape-supportive environments, can be a critical part of comprehensive campus efforts to catalyze and support men's development as women's social justice allies in preventing sexual violence against women.