An online course has been shown to curb binge drinking among college freshmen, but only for a semester. According to a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health, the benefits gained from taking the AlcoholEdu course in the fall aren’t strong enough to carry over into the spring.
Despite such limited results experts are still pleased, given the pervasive perception at college campuses that alcohol is a necessary ingredient for social success. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), these beliefs exert a powerful influence over students’ behavior, and create a campus culture that promotes college drinking as a required rite of passage.
"Prior studies have shown that the freshman year is a particularly risky time for hazardous drinking among college students," says Ralph Hingson, director of the NIAAA division of epidemiology and prevention research in a statement. "There is a need for effective prevention strategies that are timed to address this problem."
Found among these prevention strategies is AlcoholEdu. The course claims to motivate students to reevaluate unrealistic expectations about the effects of alcohol, and link choices about drinking to academic and personal success.
To test this claim, researchers at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, Calif., evaluated AlcoholEdu by giving a randomized trial of the course at 30 public and private universities throughout the United States. Incoming freshmen at half the schools took the AlcoholEdu course, while students at the other schools served as the control group—receiving conventional alcohol prevention programs. About 90 students at each school participated in regular surveys assessing various aspects of their alcohol use.
In the report, published in the September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that students who took the online course reported significantly reduced alcohol use and binge drinking during the fall semester, compared with control students. These beneficial effects did not persist into the spring semester.
"Lack of course effects in the following spring suggests that, by itself, the course may be insufficient to sustain effects over time, or perhaps that its benefit is eventually overcome by students’ exposure to alcohol and peer drinking behavior," said the study’s lead researcher Dr. Mallie Paschall in a statement.
A single semester may not seem like much, but Dr. Paschall says that the course can still serve as a "useful component of an overall strategy that combines campus-wide and environmental interventions to prevent harmful drinking by college students."
Faced with an environment that has long encouraged drinking—from campus sports arenas plastered with advertisements from alcohol industry sponsors, to the prevalence of bars and liquor stores near campuses—changing minds can be difficult. But experts say that any progress in changing student attitudes toward excessive alcohol consumption is welcome as so much is at stake.
"These findings represent one hopeful step in the long journey to address this complex issue," says NIAAA Acting Director Dr. Kenneth Warren in a statement. "Each year approximately 1,825 college students die from alcohol-related unintentional injuries; 696,000 students are assaulted by another student who has been drinking; and 97,000 students are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape."
