Evaluating Personalized Alcohol Interventions

Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL

Lane, D.J., & Schmidt, J.A. (May 2007). Evaluating Personalized Alcohol Interventions. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Area

Health

Problem or Major Purpose

Online alcohol prevention programs, which allow students to learn about alcohol abuse in a short training, are increasingly popular. Claims that a two hour training can dramatically change alcohol use, however, have not been widely assessed. Researchers at a mid-sized university decided to test one online program against a more traditional education program designed by campus staff. Both programs involved a personalized, online assessment of students’ alcohol use, but the campus program also incorporated traditional face-to-face education. The purpose was to see if the online program led to better outcomes than what was currently available on campus.

Procedure

Housing staff chose a residence hall for the programs, and recruited residents’ floors to participate; residents were assigned by floor to one of three conditions: the online program, the campus program, and a control condition. Of 358 consenting new students, 235 completed the study early in Fall semester; participation in the two treatment conditions (involving 1-2 hour trainings), was approximately 50%. Researchers subsequently collected academic information: GPA over two semesters and continued enrollment.

Results

One concern about the attrition in the two treatment conditions was that students who chose not to complete the training were different from those who did complete it. Those who completed the programs did not differ from those who did not on either ACT score or past alcohol use, however, and those in the online program did not differ from those in the campus programs.

Fall GPA differed across the three conditions, F(2, 228) = 8.31, p < .001. Pairwise comparisons revealed that students in both the online and campus programs had higher Fall GPAs than students in the control conditions, p’s < .03; the two interventions did not differ from each other, p =.70. Similarly, the percent of students returning Spring semester was higher in both the online and campus programs than in the control conditions, χ2(1) = 4.56, p = .03, and χ2(1) = 7.96, p = .01, respectively. The two programs were not significantly different from each other.

Conclusions and implications

Students in the different conditions did not initially differ on ACT scores, but their Fall GPAs and retention across semesters did differ. Those who participated in individualized alcohol education programs had more academic success than those who did not participate, with the type of program apparently unimportant.