ru drkn 2nite?: Cellular Text Messaging Prompts for Alcohol Harm-reduction on Campus

Abstract

Half of all college students engage in drinking practices that are associated with an increase likelihood of experiencing academic, interpersonal, legal, and health-related problems. Interventions from a harm-reduction orientation have proven to be efficacious in reducing these risks. Often, a primary goal of these interventions is to help students to moderate their drinking. To help students accomplish this goal, they are taught a variety of moderation strategies. However, the usefulness of these strategies may be limited by a student's ability to recall and implement moderation strategies in a drinking context. The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of behaviorally prompting hazardous college drinkers with newly acquired moderation strategies through the use of text-message technology. The use of text-messages to moderate college student's drinking behaviors in a broadly target intervention intended for all hazardous drinking college students was ineffective at reducing drinking rates. One potentially mediating factor may be a student's readiness to change. Interestingly, a simple moderation skills training session, taking approximately 30-minutes to administer to a group of hazardous college drinking students, was found to be effective in reducing drinking rates.