The Daily Gamecock, the newspaper of the University of South Carolina, gave us a shout out today, talking about how Louisiana State University and other Southeastern Conference schools are using alcohol education programs. To read the full article, go here: http://www.dailygamecock.com/news/item/4101-sec-schools-crack-down-on-drinking
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Chances are that if you’re attending this year’s NASPA annual conference in Phoenix, you’re either on your way there as you read this or will be heading there in the coming days. For higher education professionals, both those that have been in the industry a long time and others that are just starting out, it’s an exciting time of year. A time to learn new things, share your experiences, boast about your successes, and reflect on where your institution needs to improve. It’s also fun and thrilling to meet all kinds of new people, collaborate with colleagues, and catch up with old friends. We’re excited to do just that!
A few of us at MyStudentBody will be attending this year’s conference and we would love to connect with you. Tyler Achilles, our Product Coordinator, will be attending the conference to sit in on some sessions and talk with attendees about the trends in higher education. If you’ll let him pick your brain, then he’d love to buy you some Starbucks or lunch (he’s wicked nice, we promise – and yes, we said wicked, we’re from Boston). He’ll also be tweeting during all the sessions and keynotes (he loooooves Twitter), so look for him on the #naspa12 back channel or follow him, @tyachilles, or MyStudentBody, @MyStudentBody.
Amy Cavender, our Implementation Specialist, and Holly Lyng, our Account Executive, will also be there to help current clients with questions about any recent changes we’ve made to the MyStudentBody program and to talk about exciting things coming in June 2012. They’ll mostly be hanging around booth 708 in the exhibit hall, but they’ll also be attending sessions (and buying some of our favorites some Starbucks). Stop by to say hi to them and pick up more information about our course offerings, you may get a cool prize.
Wanna set up a time to go over the program? Email Holly at hlyng@mystudentbody.com.
Have questions about how you’re currently implementing the program? Email acavender@mystudentbody.com.
Wanna be first in line for some Starbucks? Email tachilles@mystudentbody.com. Just kidding you can email any one of us for that 
Have a safe trip and we’ll see all of you hard-working, fun, and vibrant higher ed peeps at the conference!
