Brief Alcohol Intervention for School-to-Work Transitions

This study tested the efficacy of a single session of BMI for reducing heavy drinking and related adverse consequences among underage young adult drinkers not attending a 4-year college or university. We designed the intervention to be delivered proximal to the transition out of high school (with or without graduation), because such periods of transition and discontinuity in the life course present opportunities to positively alter developmental paths (Masten et al., 2009). Thus, interventions timed to co-occur with naturalistic transition points may have great potential for decreasing drinking trajectories or preventing harmful escalations in trajectories going forward. To increase the applicability of our findings to the heterogeneous population of community-dwelling young adults, our recruitment targeted a purposefully inclusive "non-4-year-college" population. We hypothesized that, compared to a time and attention-matched control condition (i.e., relaxation training [REL]), BMI would result in significantly reduced heavy drinking and reduced adverse consequences of alcohol use at 6-week and 3-month follow-up.