Evaluation of a brief harm reduction intervention to reduce celebratory drinking among college students

Abstract

Objectives: To assess the effectiveness of a harm reduction e-card at increasing protective drinking behaviors and decreasing negative outcomes from consuming alcohol.Participants: Participants were college students who turned 21 years old between January 21 2016 and September 27 2017. A total of 1,064 students completed the posttest: 737 from the experimental group and 327 from the control group.Methods: This study is a randomized controlled trial evaluation. Three days prior to their birthdays, students were randomly selected to receive a harm reduction e-card (experimental group) or not (control group). Three days after their birthdays, all students were sent an electronic posttest survey to the student’s university email address.Results: Students who received the e-card intervention reported employing more protective behaviors than the individuals who did not receive the card. Conclusions: This evaluation concludes that a harm reduction e-card successfully increased the use of protective drinking strategies but did not impact negative outcomes.

Keywords:

• campus alcohol use
• harm reduction
• risky drinking
• 21st birthday e-card

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States of America and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Northern Arizona University.

Funding

No funding was used to support this research and/or the preparation of the manuscript.

Table 1. Comparison of key variables by group.

Table 2. Percentage and chi-square values of students who reported each type of protective behavior.

Table 3. Percentage and chi-square values of students who reported each type of negative outcome.

Table 4. Results of t-tests and descriptive statistics comparing protective behavior and negative outcomes by group.