College Student Awareness of Alcohol Programs and Policies: Prevalence and Correlates

Background and Purpose: Heavy episodic (binge) drinking (HED), has gained national attention as one of the leading health problems affecting college students. The impact of the growing number of prevention and intervention programs aimed at addressing college students' HED and alcohol-related problems (ARP) may be limited if students are not aware of them. The few studies that have looked at this issue suggest that lack of awareness of college alcohol programs and policies may be widespread. To ultimately enhance the effectiveness of college alcohol programming, we need to understand both the scope and the correlates of student policy and program awareness. This poster addresses these critically important but largely unaddressed issues.

Methods: Undergraduate students (n=628) attending a large urban public university in the Midwest were randomly chosen to complete a web-based alcohol and drug use survey in the Spring of 2007. Students where asked if they knew about the university's alcohol policies, the existence of an alcohol prevention program, and whether alcohol treatment options were available. Using logistic regression, responses to each of the three awareness questions were regressed on a binary indicator of recent (past two week) HED, a 17 item ARP scale, gender, race/ethnicity, legal drinking age status, year in school, and living arrangements. In each regression model, responses of “no” and “don't know” were combined into one category to indicate lack of awareness.

Results: Analyses indicated that the majority of students were not aware of campus alcohol policies (57.1%), the existence of an alcohol prevention program (71.3%), and the existence of alcohol treatment options (58.3%). HED was not significantly associated with any of the awareness measures. Higher levels of ARP, however, significantly increased odds of awareness of a prevention program (p< .05) and awareness of treatment options (p< .05). Living situation was associated with policy awareness. Compared to students living in residence halls, students living in an off campus house or apartment had significantly decreased odds of alcohol policy awareness (p <.01). No other demographic variables were associated with any other awareness outcome.

Conclusions and Implications: The association between ARP and program awareness suggests that that information about programs reached those most in need – but perhaps after the need was identified (i.e., after the problems occurred). The potential for prevention and intervention programming effectiveness may be limited by the widespread lack of program awareness among students. In addition to general lack of awareness, of further concern is the lack of variability across demographic subgroups. It is surprising that levels of awareness did not increase as students advanced in their undergraduate career and that there were no differences in awareness between freshman and upperclassmen. The lack of demographic variability in relation to our dependent constructs suggests that program and policy awareness may be relatively intractable. Given the continued growth in campus alcohol prevention and intervention efforts, further research explicating the awareness construct and informing potential strategies for enhancing awareness is needed.