Brief Alcohol Interventions by Counselor vs Computer

Many college students engage in heavy episodic drinking, a pattern that increases risks of undesired academic, social, health, and legal consequences. Fortunately, brief motivational interventions - when administered during face-to-face sessions by a trained counselor - can help students to reduce their heavy drinking and related consequences. However, use of such counselor-administered interventions on college campuses remains infrequent; instead, administrators rely on computerized brief interventions because they can be administered with fewer staff at lower cost. Two computer-administered interventions (AlcoholEdu and Alcohol 101 Plus) are used by more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide, even though these interventions have not been evaluated in controlled studies. Despite the magnitude of the college-drinking problem, no data have addressed the differential efficacy (or cost-effectiveness) of the computer-administered versus counselor-administered brief motivational interventions. Thus, the primary purpose of the proposed research is to address gaps in the scientific literature by evaluating outcomes of three types of brief motivational interventions: a theoretically-based and empirically-tested counselor-administered intervention and the two most popular computerized interventions. A secondary purpose of the proposed research is to identify predictors of outcomes, and moderators associated with differential intervention response. A tertiary purpose is to assess the cost-effectiveness of three types of brief motivational interventions. The proposed research will be a randomized controlled trial with four treatment conditions and four assessment occasions. We will recruit at-risk student drinkers who have been sanctioned to receive an alcohol education intervention because they violated a residence hall policy. These referred students will be randomized to one of the three interventions, or to a delayed intervention control; and assessed at baseline and again 1, 6, and 12 months later on key drinking and drinking consequences outcomes.