FY 2003 Awardees: Grant Competition to Prevent High-Risk Drinking or Violent Behavior Among College Students

The U.S. Department of Education is pleased to announce this year’s awardees under the Grant Competition to Prevent High-Risk Drinking and Violent Behavior Among College Students. Of the 159 proposals reviewed by 14 panels of 3 peer reviewers each, 14 proposals were funded. These campus- and community-based organizations have been funded to develop or enhance, implement, and evaluate strategies to prevent high-risk drinking and/or violent behavior among college students.

The Albuquerque Partnership
Project Target
Project Director: Moises Venegas

The project's goal is to reduce and prevent high-risk drinking among students at the University of New Mexico (UNM), and through a campus-community coalition, reduce problems associate with alcohol abuse in university area neighborhoods. Specific objectives include developing programs to reduce high-risk drinking through community initiatives involving neighborhood associations, the Albuquerque Police Department, UNM students, and alcohol merchants; and developing and implementing a social norms marketing campaign to increase students' ability to accurately assess campus drinking norms and reduce high-risk drinking.

George Mason University
Healthy Expectations: Preventing High-Risk Drinking by Transforming Campus Cultures
Project Director: David Anderson

The project’s goal is to change the campus culture surrounding high-risk drinking through changing expectations, norms, and skills, and promoting proactive life health planning among first-year students. Specific objectives include modifying behavior, negative consequences, and expectations about alcohol issues by correcting misperceptions and promoting life health principles; and enhancing collaboration and consistency among campus offices and staff for promoting life health planning and modifying misperceptions among students and other intermediaries.

Gonzaga University
Changing Campus Culture to Create a Safe and Sober Learning Community
Project Director: Mary Ritter Heitkemper

The goals of the project are to design a campus-wide campaign to promote accurate healthy norms for alcohol drinking and nonuse, while targeting first-year students and students living in residence halls with a high incidence of alcohol-related problems, and support the training of student leaders and staff involved in alcohol abuse discipline in effective indicated prevention; develop curriculum materials that closely link the multiple-level intervention to the social justice mission of the university, making it relevant to the reasons that motivate students to attend a faith-based university; and utilize a carefully constructed and comprehensive evaluation to compare outcomes on the Gonzaga University campus with outcomes of effective integrated approaches on large public university campuses.

Harvard College
The Harvard Sexual Assault Prevention Intervention Program and Evaluation
Project Director: Jay Silverman

The project's purpose is to implement a comprehensive sexual assault prevention program with all incoming first-year students at Harvard College, reduce the incidence of sexual assault victimization and perpetration, and improve related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Intended outcomes include a sexual assault prevention program with potential for replication at campus around the nation, and a new model of programming that combines the concerns of advocates for devotion of greater time and resources, and of administrators for an evidence-based approach capable of reaching all incoming students.

Kent State University
Web-Based Delivery of Normative Feedback to Deter High-Risk Drinking in Residence Hall
Project Director: Dennis Thombs

The purposes of this project are to determine whether credible and personally relevant feedback provided via the Web, and based heavily on BAC data, reduces alcohol intoxication levels as well as self-reported drinking behaviors and consequences among students living in residence halls, and to determine whether the intervention can increase help-seeking behavior among high-risk drinkers.

Loyola Marymount University
HEADS UP: Changing Campus Culture by Reducing the Effects of Problem Drinking
Project Director: Joseph LaBrie

The purpose of this project is to intervene with high-risk students (i.e., freshmen males and students sanctioned by Judicial Affairs for drinking-related violations) to reduce their drinking, and change the campus culture with respect to drinking by involving all first-year students, student leaders, faculty, staff, and parents in a comprehensive alcohol awareness and prevention program. Expected outcomes are reduced recidivism for alcohol-related judicial offenses; reduced number of problems resulting from drinking among first-year students; reduced negative costs/effects linked to alcohol; and increased campus-wide awareness of the University's commitment to prevent problem drinking.

Maine Office of Substance Abuse
Maine Higher Education Alcohol Prevention Project
Project Director: Rebecca Matusovich

The goal of this project is to prevent high-risk drinking among first-year college students at Maine colleges and universities. The project design is based on a conceptual model that combines the social ecological and environmental management frameworks. Nine of Maine's 27 two- and four-year colleges partnered with the Maine Office of Substance Abuse on this project to establish a local campus-community coalition that, with support and resources from state-level staff, will implement environmental change initiatives focusing on aspects such as enforcement and availability, awareness and social norms marketing activities, and an online brief intervention and feedback tool for high-risk drinkers.

Marshall University
Comprehensive Environmental and Motivational/Educational Approach to High-Risk and Illegal Alcohol Use Prevention Among Freshmen
Project Director: Carla Lapelle

The goals of this project are to improve the visibility and persistence in alcohol law and policy enforcement; broaden faculty and staff knowledge about the scope of alcohol-related problems, environmental management, specific strategies they can implement, and available resources; and implement BASICS (Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students) to more than half of the freshmen seminar classes, and as a mandatory session for students that violate the school's alcohol policy.

Miami University of Ohio
Miami University Initiative to Reduce High-Risk Alcohol Use Among First-Year College Students
Project Director: Karen Murray

The project’s goal is to reduce the prevalence of high-risk drinking among the University’s first-year students. The evaluation design includes considering changes in the individual-level knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors; decreases in overall quantity and frequency of high-risk drinking; and changes in the number of alcohol-related incidents/problems reported to the Office of Judicial Affairs. The project design specifies strategies for first-year students, their parents, and other students and organizations that make alcohol accessible to first-year students.

Northern State University
Social Norms Plus
Project Director: Deb Walker

The project's purpose is to create linkages among numerous campus and community constituents to increase first-year students' accurate perceptions of student alcohol use; increase the number of social and recreational options known to first-year students; increase late-night activities for first year students; and decrease the climate of tolerance for problem behaviors. Surrounding one unified theme, five separate social norms marketing campaigns will be conducted each year to correct misperceptions that students have about alcohol use in general and during campus activities, and enhance protective factors surrounding the use of alcohol prior to Spring Break.

University of Arizona
Changing the Environment and Culture of Fraternity and Sorority High-Risk Drinking at the University of Arizona
Project Director: Melissa Vito

The goals of this project are to correct sorority women's misperceptions of alcohol use and behavioral norms through a social norms campaign; conduct cognitive-behavioral skills training, norms clarification, and motivational enhancement with fraternity pledges; increase knowledge about alcohol-related policies, laws, and safer consumption; limit access and availability of alcohol to all Greeks and underage students through law enforcement, community partnership, and alcohol-free activities; and disseminate findings to researchers and practitioners through meetings and publications.

University of Minnesota, Crookston
Changing the Culture of Drinking on a Small University Campus
Project Director: Don Cavalier

The goal of this project is to implement a comprehensive campus-wide prevention program that uses a blend of social norms and environmental management approaches while targeting residence hall students, student athletes, and first-year students. The grantee also will create a social marketing campaign, a campus-community task force prevention team, and an alcohol and other drug student advisory committee to promote peer education.

University of Nebraska, Lincoln
"Greek Reevolution": Enabling Cultural Change in Greek Life at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Project Director: Tom Workman

The project's goal is to reduce high-risk drinking in fraternities and sororities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The project is specifically designed to address systemic change by involving alumni to provide consistent leadership that goes beyond the time-limited terms of student leaders; providing group-based motivational and normative feedback programs to increase motivation to change within chapters; developing a set of sustained character-led prevention programs; establishing a set of policies that encourage systemic change and capitalize on the evolution of thought and practice within the Greek system; and changing the new member recruitment practices with fraternities and sororities to reduce the number of high-risk drinkers seeking membership.

Wind River Tribal College
Grant to Reduce High-Risk Drinking about Arapaho/Shoshone Students
Project Director: Gail Ridely

The purpose of this project is to implement multiple strategies to reduce high-risk drinking among the students attending Wind River Tribal College. Strategies include educational awareness, cognitive-behavioral skills training, motivational enhancement, policy and law enforcement, social norms interventions, and campus-community partnerships. The grantee also will use traditional persons and elders to provide input into culturally relevant curricula as a response to students' needs in a holistic approach to prevention.