A New Approach to College Drinking
SPH report: colleges can combat heavy drinking with mobile technology
A recent report by BU’s School of Public Health concluded that emerging technologies offer an opportunity to build effective alcohol prevention and treatment interventions.
Imagine heading out to a neighborhood bar and getting an automatic text reminder to moderate your drinking. Or logging the number of beers you consume into an app on your phone, which sends you personalized messages when you hit a predetermined limit.
These are just a few of the ways that social media messaging and web-based interventions can help colleges prevent and reduce excessive drinking, according to a report by School of Public Health researcher David Rosenbloom, a professor of health policy, working with a group of experts.
The report, released in May, recommends that colleges use mobile technology to address heavy drinking on campuses as part of a comprehensive approach that includes consistent enforcement of drinking age and consumption laws, trained intervention specialists, and a crackdown on low-priced serving methods such as kegs and happy hours.
“Low prices and easy availability of essentially unlimited amounts of alcohol, especially served in large containers in poorly supervised settings, create an almost insurmountable barrier to effective action to prevent and reduce harm,” the report says. The work was supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
The group of experts on college-age drinking came together from 17 universities and organizations for a workshop hosted at SPH. Web-based screening and intervention programs that have been shown to be effective in small trials should be tested on a larger scale and over a long enough time to measure their usefulness, they said. They also recommend that credible messaging discouraging excessive drinking should be developed for students by experts in web/mobile design and programming.
“Emerging technologies offer an almost unprecedented opportunity to build and implement effective prevention and treatment interventions at scale, particularly in screening and intervention,” notes the report.
Among the options for such mobile technology is geotargeting, which could enable message delivery to a student who has been identified at risk, at the time and place where heavy drinking episodes might occur, Rosenbloom says. Other options include web-based screenings and brief interventions, which have been shown to be effective in reducing unhealthy drinking in other populations, and creating a “mobile support community,” where students could get immediate support from peers.
Rosenbloom says the group of experts recognized that students “organize and live their lives on their smartphones and social media, making it possible to reach them at exactly the time they need information and help to avoid harm.” He adds, however, that social media tools “need to be utilized in the context of comprehensive policies that address price, access, and accountability.”
The report faults colleges for failing to sustain resources and a commitment to the kinds of comprehensive strategies that have been found effective in reducing alcohol-related harms. For example, many colleges now have some form of a brief alcohol education program, often delivered during freshman orientation, but with little or no follow-up. Most colleges also have a disciplinary process to adjudicate alcohol-related offenses and refer students with alcohol problems for brief interventions, but many fail to maintain such programs with an adequately trained staff.
There are several components to a successful college alcohol prevention policy, Rosenbloom says: public commitment to a strong policy, with a senior administrator in charge; extensive prevention and education programs; environmental policies to reduce availability, such as enforcement of laws in cooperation with local police; and professional assistance for students with drinking problems.
Studies have shown that “almost no colleges have all those elements in place over any extended period of time,” he says. A 2013 national survey of college administrators found that most colleges had one element in place, but only a few had two, and almost none had them all.
According to the SPH report, the jump in drinking rates between senior year of high school and freshman year in college is dramatic: “Many [students] start drinking heavily almost immediately upon arrival at college, even though they were not drinkers through their senior year in high school. The change is abrupt, and the negative consequences are serious.”
In addition to Rosenbloom, Richard Saitz (CAS’87, MED’87), an SPH professor and chair of community health sciences and a School of Medicine professor of medicine, and David McBride, the former director of Student Health Services, now director of the University of Maryland’s Health Center, contributed to the report.
Lisa Chedekel can be reached at chedekel@bu.edu.
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