Protecting Allies in Risky Situations
Condition: Sexual Assault; College Drinking; Behavioral Changes
MeSH terms: Alcohol Drinking in College
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      The current project will provide testing of a friend-based motivational interview (FMI)
      designed to reduce sexual assault risk. The study will address if the intervention minimizes
      the impact of alcohol on helping behavior, test whether drinking reduces intervention
      efficacy, and examine potential iatrogenic effects of the intervention.
    

Detailed description: 
      The objective of the proposed study is to develop an innovative, friend-based motivational
      interview (FMI) that encourages and prepares friends to reduce sexual assault (SA) risk.
      Delivered to pairs of friends (dyads), the FMI will be designed to foster collaborative
      efforts to increase readiness for, and decrease barriers to helping behavior, and to teach
      and plan together for assault prevention skills. As the role of alcohol has been
      under-addressed in SA prevention efforts, the FMI also will explicitly attend to how
      intoxication may serve as a barrier to friend intervention, and strategies for overcoming
      this barrier. The completion of this project's aims will yield a novel intervention that
      capitalizes on the natural resource of women's friendships to decrease risk for sexual
      assault - a pervasive public health problem affecting a substantial portion of young adult
      women in the U.S.

      Twenty-four friend dyads will participate in the friend-based motivational interview (FMI)
      along with 24 wait-list control dyads (total of 48 dyads). The study will compare groups on
      outcomes at post-intervention and at bi-weekly 3 month follow-ups, and also examine within
      participant change. The study will focus on whether effects are in the expected direction and
      whether the strength of effect sizes are of practical magnitude. It is expected that
      participants receiving the FMI will demonstrate significant increases in readiness, and
      engagement in friend assault prevention behavioral skills (FAPBs), and demonstrate decreases
      in perceived barriers, at post-intervention and over the 3-month follow-up. Follow-up data
      will be utilized to provide a rich description of the role of alcohol in implementing FAPBs,
      and whether the FMI reduces the impact of alcohol use. In exploratory analyses, it will be
      examined whether the intervention may be associated with decreased assault risk, as well as
      decreased drinking.
    

Intervention name(s): Friend-Based Motivational Interview
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Intervention description(s): The intervention will use Motivational Interviewing's (MI) collaborative conversation style for strengthening commitment to change, to motivate and prepare women to work together to reduce Sexual Assault (SA) risk. This intervention will target ways that the friend dyad may support, encourage, and share responsibility with one another in protecting against SA. The Friend-based MI (FMI) will then use the responsibility and relationship of friends as a framework to foster collaborative efforts to increase readiness and decrease barriers to helping behavior. As part of this, the FMI will focus on the identification and implementation of skills friends can use to help one another prevent sexual assault. FMI will include a focused discussion of the ways drinking may impede helping efforts. Moreover, the FMI will encourage women to identify personal, specific strategies for reducing the effects of alcohol on helping.
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Prevention