| Alcohol
Research Collaborative: Retail Alcohol Outlets
Principal Investigator:
Robert F. Saltz, Ph.D.
The extreme levels of drinking
and associated problems observed among college students are
"rediscovered" every few years, most recently in
the report of the NIAAA Task Force on College Drinking report,
“A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking
at U.S. Colleges” (April 2002). Yet, despite this, little
progress has been made toward preventing drinking problems
within this important group of young people.
The Task Force report, however,
represents a potential major influence to reshape prevention
efforts by virtue of its identifying recommended strategies
on the basis of empirical research. Those recommendations
include prevention focused on businesses that are licensed
to sell alcoholic beverages (on and off-premise). In the proposed
study we plan to take the experiences gained by our and others'
community prevention interventions to evaluate the impact
of a community-based intervention that would work with licensed
outlets to 1) reduce the availability of alcohol to minors
and 2) reduce service to anyone who is obviously intoxicated
and therefore at risk of causing harm to themselves or others.
The
project would involve four hypothetical campuses (to be named
as part of the cooperative agreement protocols) in an effort
to understand how risk-management strategies in licensed outlets
may work to reduce alcohol-related problems among students.
These four campuses would then be compared to parallel data
(from student surveys and obtaining archival data) being collected
in comparison sites for an ongoing study. This quasi-experimental
design will permit an evaluation of the program's impact on
the frequency of intoxication, binge drinking, and prevalence
of negative consequences as compared to the baseline and across
the comparison campus.
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