NIH Radio
Colleges and communities can reduce alcohol-related harm to students
Brief Description:
Coordinated strategies can help colleges and their communities protect students from the harms of high-risk drinking.
Transcript:
Akinso: Strategies that address alcohol availability, alcohol policy enforcement and drinking norms can help colleges and communities reduce alcohol related harm to students. These coordinated strategies were part of the Study to Prevent Alcohol Related Consequences, known as SPARC. Dr. Ralph Hingson, an expert on alcohol prevention at the NIH, explains the purpose of SPARC.
Hingson: The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a multi-component of college community collaborative intervention to reduce high risk drinking and negative consequences from drinking.
Akinso: Risks and consequences associated with drinking can include car accidents, DUIs or DWIs, the need for medical treatment as a result of drinking, physical fights, and sexual assaults. Dr. Hingson says the study examined environmental approaches that had shown promise in communities but had not been thoroughly studied on college campuses.
Hingson: What they did was they selected 10 universities in North Carolina. And match them according to their size and their readiness to engage in activities to prevent these drinking problems; and then randomly allocated half of them to receive the intervention.
Akinso: Within the five campuses in the intervention group, many strategies were similar. Dr. Hingson says there was a focus on specific areas of intervention.
Hingson: Reducing the availability of alcohol, minimizing harm from alcohol misuse, altering social norms and increasing alcohol price and restricting marketing. And then specifically within the schools the most common interventions were restricting provision of alcohol for underage and intoxicated students, coordinating campus and community police enforcement, restricting alcohol purchase and possession, restricting alcohol and campus events, and they implemented consistent disciplinary actions for alcohol policy violations.
Akinso: For three years, researchers surveyed students about their drinking habits and resulting harms and found small but significant decreases in two categories.
Hingson: Well they didn’t find significant changes with regards to drinking, but they did find significant reductions in consequences that those who misused alcohol experienced themselves and they also saw a reduction in injuries to other people.
Akinso: Dr. Hingson believes that these modest reductions in harm will translate into many students being helped by the intervention. For example, a college campus with 11,000 students, researchers estimate the SPARC intervention will result in 228 fewer students experiencing at least one severe consequence of drinking over the course of a month and 107 fewer students injuring others due to alcohol use during the year. He added that an important future step will be to focus on methods to promote adoption and implementation of the SPARC intervention in colleges across the US. For more information on the SPARC intervention, visit www.niaaa.nih.gov. For NIH Radio, this is Wally Akinso—NIH… Turning Discovery into Health.
About This Audio Report
Date: 7/24/2012
Reporter: Wally Akinso
Sound Bite: Dr. Hingson
Topic: College, Drinking, Alcohol, intervention, SPARC, Students, Universities, University, Communities, Community
Institute(s):
NIAAA
Additional Info:
Colleges and communities can reduce alcohol-related harm to students
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