The UH Wellness Center’s comprehensive alcohol prevention program has been nationally recognized for its assistance to students in making intelligent decisions regarding the choice to consume alcohol.
‘Students on campuses are usually considered high risk and have the opportunities to make not so great decisions,’ outreach counselor and project director Gaylyn Maurer said. ‘We want students to have all the information so they can make good decisions.’
The alcohol prevention program was recently awarded the 2009 National Exemplary Award for Innovative Substance Abuse Prevention Programs, Practices and Policies from the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors for their work with student groups. The program particularly focuses on what is called the IMAGE section of the program, or Intent and Motivation: Alcohol Group Exercise.
‘The first thing we do is pre-test,’ Director of Wellness Gail Gillan said. ‘We ask four important questions: how many drinks do you typically consume in a week, how many drinks do you think the typical UH student consumes in a week, how often in the last 30 days have you consumed alcohol, and how often in the last 30 days do you think the average university student has consumed alcohol?’
Based on this information, the students quickly see that their perception of how much alcohol is being consumed by university students is significantly more than what is actually occurring, Gillan said.
The program, which began’ about three and a half years ago, specifically targets cohort groups across campus. The primary three are student-athletes, first-year residential students and Greek life.
‘We were awarded U.S. Department of Education’s model program grant because we had demonstrated effectiveness in the program,’ Gillan said. ‘So for the last couple of years, what we’ve done is target those groups by going to them and talking to their leadership and trying to tell them what the program is about, encouraging them. We’ve been able to do that successfully.’
Program workers such as graduate student Tara Waddell’ visit various’ cohort groups and implement the program, which takes around 45 minutes. It is an information session regarding high risk drinking and the possibility of negative and positive outcomes associated with the decisions involving alcohol, empowering students to not only help themselves, but each other.
‘What’s interesting for me,’ Waddell said, ‘is that I’ve gone through a whole year of this and those students that tended to have high-drinking behaviors would find that their perceptions were higher than the reality of it and begin to change their drinking behaviors.
‘Those that drink high, because they think others drink high, have decreased over time because their perception and reality are starting to line up.’
Something the program has started to focus on, with a few years of data, is individual student progress.
‘Because part of what we want to do is research (the data) and find out how affective (the program) is, we’re currently able to follow individuals across time to see whether the impact is maintained,’ Gillan said. ‘So we’re not only doing pre-rests and then the program, we do an immediate post-test. We also follow up at one month and six months to find out if they actually implemented the self protection behaviors; we’re finding that they are.’
Additionally, the program is already working toward its next opportunity at a U.S. Department of Education model program grant in the spring.
‘We already have a model program grant where we are focusing on promising practice, but we can reapply,” Maurer said.’ ‘We’re now striving for an exemplary status grant with a longer grant period, more funding and more opportunities to disseminate our efforts.’
Gillan said she is excited about the impact of the program.
‘I feel positively about Greek life, residential life and student athletes, which are going to become a stronger part of this campus as we start receiving (flagship) recognition,’ Gillan said.’ ‘This campus deserves to see so many students in those groups making such positive choices and helping each other out. That’s pretty exciting to watch.’
