Assessing College Students' Attitudes Toward Responsible Drinking Messages to Identify Promising Binge Drinking Intervention Strategies

Abstract

Health communication appeals were utilized through a Web site simulation to evaluate the potential effectiveness of 3 intervention approaches to promote responsible drinking among college students. Within the Web site simulation, participants were exposed to a persuasive message designed to represent either the generalized social norms advertising approach (based on others' behavior), the personalized behavioral feedback approach (tailored to the individual's behavior), or the schema-based approach (tailored to the individual's self-schema, or personality). A control group was exposed to a message that was designed to be neutral (it was designed to discourage heavy drinking, but it did not represent any of the previously mentioned approaches). It was hypothesized that the more personalized the message was to the individual, the more favorable college students' attitudes would be toward the responsible drinking message. Participants receiving the more personalized messages did report more favorable attitudes toward the responsible drinking message.

Notes

¹An alternate way to implement the social norms approach is more personalized. The specific peer group social norms approach uses group norms based on a specific group that the individual identifies with or belongs to (e.g., Greek house, athletic team). For example, Far and Miller (2003) provided presentations tailored to Greek houses to correct misperceptions of norms. Similarly, approaches referred to as BASICS (Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students) and ASTP (Alcohol Skills Training Program) provide information on drinking norms in a more personalized way (Blume & Marlatt, 2004). Another way to implement social norms interventions is to provide normative feedback to individual students. This approach assesses the individual's drinking habits and perceptions of norms and provides the individual feedback that allows the person to compare his or her behavior to the behavior of the group. All of these social norms approaches provide information on group norms. However, the approaches vary based on the intention of the student and the channel the message is disseminated across. These more personalized social norms approaches are not as commonly used on college campuses (Larimer & Cronce, 2002).

²Existing measures of attitude toward binge drinking were not included in this study. The main goal of the study was to gain insight into what approaches to discouraging binge drinking students prefer. However, it would be interesting to relate students' attitudes toward binge drinking to their ratings of the approaches. Possible scales that could be used to assess attitudes toward drinking are the College Drinking Attitudes Scale (Gonzalez, 1990) and the Drinking Expectancy Questionnaire (Young & Knight, 1989).

³The wording of the dependent variable “The binge drinking message affected my attitudes about drinking responsibly” does not specify a change in a particular direction. Given that it was clear that the goal of the message was to promote positive attitudes toward drinking responsibly, the likely interpretation is that the message affected attitudes about drinking responsibly in a positive way. In the future, this variable should be stated: “The binge drinking message positively affected my attitudes about drinking responsibly.”

⁴Participants were allowed to view the message on the Web site as long as they chose. The amount of time each participant spent on that particular Web page was not recorded. In the future, time spent on the Web page with the drinking message should be recorded to see if time spent viewing the message influenced participants' ratings of the messages. Given that all messages were the same approximate length, there is no reason to think there should be systematic differences in the amount of time spent on the Web page based on message condition. However, it is impossible to be certain without actually measuring examination time.

⁵Although no predictions were made in relation to gender, women had more positive attitudes toward the PSAs regardless of which message they received. These gender effects are not surprising given that past research has established that female students are less likely to participate in binge drinking activities (e.g., Wechsler, Dowdall, Davenport, & Castillo, 1995). If women are less likely to binge drink, it makes sense that they would have less favorable attitudes toward binge drinking, and thus would have more favorable attitudes toward PSAs that aim to reduce binge drinking in the student population.

⁶It should be noted that the means for the more personalized messages were not rated highly favorably (i.e., scores were at the scale midpoint). This suggests that college students do not react favorably to encountering messages discouraging them from binge drinking. In addition, the study utilized a one-shot appeal, and people may find the messages more likeable over time, thus the messages may have an increasing impact over time (see footnote 7). The more personalized messages, although not rated highly favorably, were rated significantly higher than the social norms advertising and neutral control messages.

⁷The results of this study were particularly impressive given that the interventions involved exposing participants to a very short message at one point in time. However, length of exposure should not be an issue because this study assessed message acceptance rather than behavior change. Future research should investigate whether providing longer exposure to the message (i.e., by using longer messages or with repeated exposure to the message) might be even more effective in producing actual behavior change. It may be that, if the messages are persuasive, longer messages or more frequent exposure to the short messages may result in greater and more lasting behavior change. Messages that are encountered repeatedly over time are more likely to continue to influence a person's attitudes and behavior over time and ultimately be more effective (Petty & Wegener, 1998).

⁸Future studies should measure actual behavior change. The results of this study suggest that students evaluate the personalized behavioral feedback and the schema-correspondence approaches more favorably than the most commonly used approach (i.e., generalized social norms). The next step is to determine if these messages produce a change in college student binge drinking behavior.