Category Archives: Resources

Achieve a 90% Response Rate to Your Alcohol & Drug Survey

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The typical response rate for college alcohol and drug surveys is somewhere between 25 and 35%. But at Stetson University, more than 90% of the freshman class completes the MyStudentBody Essentials course—even though it’s not mandatory. What strategy produces those results?

The answer is: lots of strategies – and the key is to use more than one.

Working with Stetson’s Director of Health Education and Wellness, Lynn Stadelman, MyStudentBody product coordinator Tyler Achilles determined four elements that, used together, encourage the best possible response rate. “Most of these strategies are things prevention professionals are already doing. We found that what was most important was to do all of these things,” Achilles explained. “But we also found some small tweaks that could really improve a strategy’s effectiveness.” Some examples:

1) Advance notification: Sending advance notification by [snail] mail is especially useful in getting students to take Web-based surveys. It literally gives more weight to the request. Achilles notes it’s also an opportunity to send an incentive.

2) Incentives: Surprisingly, offering a guaranteed low-cost incentive—such as a free soda at the college café—to everyone who takes your survey raises response rates more effectively than offering a chance at a higher-value prize that only a few will win.

3) Reminders: The magic number for emailed reminders turns out to be three. After that, reminders don’t generate much further response, and may start to seem intrusive.

4) Sharing the results: Students want to know how their responses contribute to shaping policy; they also want to see how their answers compare to those of their peers. Knowing they’ll see group results increases student participation.

To see more of Achilles and Stadelman’s advice, view the poster they presented in January at NASPA’s Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention and Intervention Conference in Atlanta.

Wake Forest Uses MyStudentBody Program to Supplement Mandatory Student Health Course

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Located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University is a small, nationally-renowned liberal arts college with approximately 5,000 undergraduate students.

Wake Forest’s course offerings and degree programs are designed to provide a well-rounded, diverse education for its students. Undergraduates may select among 38 major fields and 55 minors, with over half of graduating seniors seeking degree credits abroad.

In order to ensure students enjoy not only a well-rounded academic education, but a thorough health education as well, Wake Forest requires students to pass a health course that informs students about the effect of lifestyle behaviors that may lead to disease and other illnesses.

The Challenge

Every undergraduate student is required to enroll in and pass a course called HES 100: Lifestyle and Health. On the Wake Forest website, this course is described as “a lecture course that deals with the effect of lifestyle behaviors on various health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases.”

The purpose of the course is to “give students a guide for living a healthy lifestyle,” said health educator Natascha Romeo. “Every student must take the class to graduate.”

Since implementing a mandatory health course was challenging, Wake Forest sought a program that would blur the lines between a standard lecture course and a personalized wellness tool that students would find interesting and useful. The campus had taken great pains to ensure this balance, including bringing in health specialists to elaborate on specific lifestyle topics relevant to students.

To find out how Natascha and Wake Forest University met this challenge, read more here.

What I Learned About Personal Branding at #NASPA12

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At the NASPA Annual Conference 2012 a lot of the sessions got me thinking about personal brand and professional networking. Conferences are always great for professional development and growing your skill set, meeting new people, and creating connections (personal and work-related) – all things that can help you in your career.

There are, however, some things to keep in mind as you jump into the social sphere and put yourself – including your personality, opinions, and online demeanor – on public display. It’s important to be careful about what you post and how you interact with others on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. I’ll get into some of my tips for both students and administrators and what I learned at one particular session below.

Before I get into that, let me tell you about two things that got me really excited about the conference in general. What I found most interesting (and different from previous NASPA conferences that I’ve attended) was the amount of networking and professional development done through sharing on social platforms during the conference. At prior annual conferences, connections were mainly made face-to-face or through email after the conference with maybe a little social networking thrown in.

In 2012, there was an explosion of social networking, especially through Twitter on which attendees or people around the country could follow the #naspa12 hashtag and “listen in” on sessions they couldn’t attend and contribute thoughtfully to the ideas being presented. This sort of thing blows my mind and makes me appreciate the recent advances in technology and the ubiquity of social platforms.

Additionally, I was delightfully surprised at the amount of sessions dedicated to talking about social networks and how that can affect administrators and students. I say delightfully surprised because as the social media coordinator of MyStudentBody and a strong believer in social and professional networking, I believe we should be talking about this and it makes me happy that others do, too.

One session in particular caught my attention because of its interactive setup. It was called “Influencing Student Behavior Through the Idea of Personal Brand” and it talked particularly about a program designed to get high-risk groups on campus, mainly athletes and Greeks, to think about their actions and how it effects them both personally and as a group. The session went through a series of slides depicting brands and talking about how they got to where they are and about setbacks incurred by seemingly small things. They connected those large brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, and Disney to the idea of personal brand.

Ultimately, the message here was that so much goes into creating a positive image for your personal brand that it’s not worth letting one excessive night of drinking and partying or other not-so-positive activities destroy your reputation. It puts things into perspective.

This idea of personal brand can also be applied to social networking and professional development for both students and administrators. You should be careful about the “brand” you’re portraying online through your tweets and status updates. Most of the time, it’s public, unless you’ve locked down your profiles so that only certain people can view your interactions. With that in mind, here are three tips for maintaining a positive personal brand:

  1. Only tweet or post things you’d say to someone or about something face-to-face. Many times people believe that they can’t get in trouble or tarnish their reputation with things they say online because, well, it’s online. So not true. People are watching what you say and how you interact. Always keep in mind the messages you’re putting out to the world because, whether you like it or not, you’re being judged for it and there could be consequences.
  2. But don’t be afraid to show some personality. It’s okay to let your personality shine. We all want to know who you are and what you’re passionate about. That’s how you make connections online. People will be more likely to interact with you if you show some human traits. Don’t just post news articles or retweet everything. Put something personal up every now and then to showcase your interests.
  3. Remember that you are connected to your organization or school. Not only does what you post on Twitter and Facebook have an effect on your personal brand, it can negatively affect the brand of your institution or organization. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “Is what I’m about to tweet or post thoughtfully contributing to the conversation?” Try to avoid posting about negative feelings or venting. This usually will come back to bite you, or at least gradually decrease the value of your personal brand.

You may not quite understand it all yet. No one does. But I would definitely recommend getting out there and letting yourself be known on social platforms. Work your way up to it. You don’t have to dive in completely, but you could definitely learn a lot from others and make great connections.

I know for sure that my involvement with social networking at this year’s NASPA annual conference helped me professionally and personally. I learned a TON. If you’d like to chat more about this concept of personal brand or anything social networking, tweet me @tyachilles.

Tailoring Prevention Strategies: Are There Subgroups That We Have Not Considered?

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When campus alcohol abuse prevention professionals want to develop population-based programs, they often target students based on single risk factors such as race, gender, and previous drinking behavior. But those factors paint with a very broad brush. Recently, a team of MyStudentBody researchers led by Emil Chiauzzi, Ph.D., analyzed data from more than 20,000 first-year students who had completed the MyStudentBody Essentials Course to look for previously-unidentified risk categories that might help prevention professionals target programs more closely.

Using latent class analysis, a statistical technique that reveals subgroups (classes) based on correlations between characteristics, the team looked for connections between alcohol consumption and other factors, including the use of marijuana and prescription medications for nonmedical purposes, protective behaviors that mitigate the hazards of drinking, and the experience of negative physiological and behavioral consequences from alcohol use.

The analysis divided students into four groups, based on drinking risk:

1) Low-risk drinkers: 46%

2) Lower-intake drinkers with other identified risks: 20%

3) Moderate-risk drinkers: 14%

4) High-risk drinkers: 20%

The study confirmed that the majority of incoming students either don’t drink or are low-risk drinkers, that high-risk drinking groups are largely made up of white males, that social norms perceptions become more inaccurate as the level of high-volume drinking increases, and that the use of protective tactics to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed and/or the consequences of drinking fall with the amount of high-risk drinking.

But where the latent class analysis really showed its power was in identifying a possible category of students that’s as large as the group of high-risk drinkers (20% of the sample), and suffer consequences at nearly the same rate, despite peak blood alcohol levels that are far lower than those reported by high-risk drinkers.

Students in this group—the “lower intake drinkers with other identified risks”—are also nearly twice as likely as the low-risk drinkers to have used marijuana or prescription drugs for non-medical purposes in the past year (61% vs. 33% of the low-risk group), and more likely to have used drugs than even moderate-risk drinkers (48%). Perhaps most strikingly, 79% of this group are women.

The identification of this subgroup suggests some policy and program steps. First, it’s important to include drug use in prevention programming, and to assess students for drug use in any situation that would call for alcohol assessment. In particular, female students who enter the judicial/sanctions process or come to health services with alcohol-related physiological issues should be assessed for drug as well as alcohol use. Educational programs should teach protective tactics that help limit both drinking and its consequences, and to provide training in protective measures to women as well as men—targeting sororities, women’s teams, and other female-membership organizations. And social norms campaigns should address perceptions about drug use and its hazards, as well as those about alcohol.

For more suggestions, view the full MS PowerPoint presentation Dr. Chiauzzi delivered at NASPA AOD. (Be patient; the download may take a few seconds.)

Fulfilling Federal Mandates Part 2: Dominican College Uses MyStudentBody In Title IX Compliance

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In the first part of this series, we discussed the “Dear Partner” letter, which announced that campus drug abuse programs would be falling under increased scrutiny by the US Department of Education and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. We suggested ways that college and university administrators can step up the drug prevention programs on their campuses. In the second part of this series, we invite you to find out more about how MyStudentBody can help schools respond to another part of these new federal mandates, which was outlined in the recently distributed “Dear Colleague” letter.

Dominican College, in Orangeburg, NY, is a small college in the Catholic tradition serving about 1,800 students with professional programs in teacher education, athletic training, social work, business administration, and the health care professions of nursing and occupational and physical therapy. In addition to over 30 programs of study, the college also has a strong athletic program, sponsoring 12 intercollegiate sports in NCAA Division II.

According to Dominican College’s Prevention and Education Coordinator, Eileen A. Piccininni, MA, LPC, CASAC, CEAP, the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights last April means all US colleges will be looking more uniformly at how they handle sexual assault complaints. The letter, which the White House has declared a “significant guidance document”, reiterated schools’ obligation under Title IX to deal with sexual harassment as unlawful discrimination, and detailed the process by which institutions should respond to sexual assault complaints.

“The ‘Dear Colleague’ letter specifically references issues around sexual violence,” Piccininni says. “Every campus will be reviewing and improving methods for promoting healthy and safe environments through educating students about sexual violence issues.”

Dominican has used MyStudentBody for the past five years as part of its alcohol abuse prevention education, and began using the Essentials course, which covers sexual violence as well as alcohol and drug use, last year. Piccininni finds it an effective tool for Title IX training and documentation. “Proactively, we’ve assigned MyStudentBody Essentials as part of the curriculum for our year-long Freshman Seminar,” she says. “I also use it when I have students who violate the alcohol and other drug policy.”

As part of an educational sanction for students who violate the policy, Piccininni requires completion of either the Essentials Course or the Student Conduct Course. Piccininni has also assigned the sexual violence component of Essentials course to students whose relationships show warning signs of dating violence or potential abuse. “These courses help to increase the culture of respect for self and respect for others, instilling the importance of being an active bystander and of a shared responsibility for the safest and most healthy learning environment possible,” she explains.

And at Dominican, MyStudentBody isn’t just for students. “Every administrator in student services has been asked by our Dean of Students to take and pass the Essentials course,” Piccininni says. “We’ve recommended that faculty and other staff take it as well.”