Text Messaging as a Novel Alcohol Intervention for Community College Students

Heavy alcohol use among community college students is a serious problem, leaving students
vulnerable to social and health impairment, physical or sexual assault, unintentional
injuries, and death. However, there have been limited efforts to research and treat
community college students, despite these students comprising nearly 40% of all college
students nationwide. Community college students are diverse in ethnicity, age, socioeconomic
status, living situation, and employment status. Thus, successful interventions must be
sufficiently flexible to apply across a diverse array of individual characteristics and
needs. Unfortunately, there is evidence of great unmet need among this group; community
college students drive under the influence of alcohol more frequently than students at
four-year colleges, and due to lesser time spent on campus, are less available for in-person
interventions coordinated at their college. The long-term objective of this research program
is to address a gap in the treatment of heavy alcohol use by the community college
population. As a first step toward achieving that goal, this R21 application will develop an
intervention that is tailored to the needs of community college students and which uses
mobile communications platforms that are already used by the vast majority of this
population. Taking this approach, the intervention will be mobile, accessible wherever the
user is located, and able to be tailored to individual characteristics. We will begin by
presenting out initial intervention design to focus groups (4 groups heavy drinking
community college students) and obtaining feedback from key informants (advisory board). We
will use feedback from these groups to finalize the design and develop a working prototype.
We will then pilot the intervention among heavy drinking community college students (N=10)
for six weeks to test the usability and acceptability of the prototype intervention.
Participants will be interviewed at the end of the program to provide feedback and evaluate
their experience with the system, and content experts will again evaluate the prototype
using semi-structured interviews. Finally, we will pilot the modified intervention with
heaving drinking community college students (N=40) for six weeks. These participants will be
randomly assigned to either the intervention program or a standard intervention (print
self-help) with a contact-control. Assessments will be conducted at end-of-treatment, and at
3 and 6 months follow up. These data will be used to guide the planning of a full-scale
clinical trial to test the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of the intervention in reducing
hazardous drinking among community college students

Inclusion Criteria:

- age 18 to 28 Community College student Consume at least 4 drinks in one sitting in
the past week

Exclusion Criteria: