Early Intervention Proven to be Best Strategy for College Binge Drinking

The Penn State Live website this week reported on new “early intervention” research conducted by their own scholars that may help students from becoming binge drinkers.

"Research shows there is a spike in alcohol-related consequences that occur in the first few weeks of the semester, especially with college freshmen," said Michael J. Cleveland, research associate at the university’s Prevention Research Center and the Methodology Center. "If you can buffer that and get beyond that point and safely navigate through that passage, you reduce the risk of later problems occurring."

The researchers tested two different methods of intervention on incoming freshmen— parent-based intervention and peer-based intervention. Cleveland and his colleagues found that students who were nondrinkers before starting college, and who received the parent-based intervention, were unlikely to escalate to heavy drinking when surveyed again during the fall semester of their first year.

Students who were heavy drinkers during the summer before college were more likely to transition out of that group if they received either parent-based intervention or peer-based intervention. However, if a heavy-drinker received both interventions, there was no enhanced effect.

Cleveland also reported online in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors that 8 percent of the incoming freshmen were heavy drinkers the summer before starting college. The researchers surveyed the students again during the fall semester and found 28 percent of the freshmen now drank heavily.

The results of the study were based on a study of 1,275 high-risk matriculating college students originally conducted in 2006 by Rob Turrisi, professor of biobehavioral health. Turrisi and his colleagues randomly assigned students to one of four intervention groups—parent-based intervention only, peer-based intervention only, both parent- and peer-based intervention or no intervention—and then surveyed the students on their drinking behaviors the summer before they entered college and then again during their first fall semester.

To read more about this research, visit Penn State’s website.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism both supported this research.