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Reducing
Youth Access to Alcohol: A Randomized Trial
Principal Investigator:
Joel W. Grube, Ph.D.
Despite
nationwide adoption of a 21-year-old minimum legal drinking
age, alcohol is readily available to youth, who get it from
a variety of commercial and social sources. Although community-level
restrictions on alcohol availability to youth are becoming
increasingly important as local intervention strategies, few
studies have investigated the effects of changes in alcohol
availability at the local level on consumption by young people.
Moreover, the processes through which restrictions in alcohol
availability affect drinking by young people are unknown.
To address these issues we propose to undertake a randomized
community trial to investigate the combined effectiveness
of five interventions recommended as best practices to reduce
commercial and social access to alcohol among youth: (a) a
reward and reminder program for retail clerks and merchants,
(b) increased enforcement of sales laws through compliance
checks, (c) increased enforcement of laws against adults providing
alcohol to minors through a stranger purchase (shoulder tap)
intervention, (d) increased enforcement of laws against underage
drinking and providing alcohol to minors through a party dispersal
(party patrol) program, and (e) strategic media advocacy to
increase public awareness of the problems associated with
underage drinking and to increase public support for the interventions.
In this proposed effectiveness trial, we will randomly assign
34 Oregon communities to either intervention and control conditions
(17 per condition). The environmental prevention strategies
will be implemented in a staggered fashion over the five-year
study period. Outcome measures will be based on alcohol purchase
surveys and student surveys conducted in all 34 communities.
Several waves of baseline data have already been collected
from middle and high school students for the Oregon Healthy
Teens Project. The state of Oregon will pay for community
coordinators and related intervention costs, and will be work
in close collaboration with the Pacific Institute for Research
and Evaluation and the Oregon Research Institute to ensure
that the study is implemented as planned. This study will
identify intervening mechanisms through which environmental
strategies affect underage drinking and will have important
implications for the prevention of underage drinking and drinking
problems.
Proceed
to PRC CD Presentation featuring Dr. Joel W. Grube
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