Text Messaging as a Novel Alcohol Intervention for Community College Students
Condition: Alcohol Use
MeSH terms: Alcohol Drinking
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      This project will develop an intervention delivered through text messaging to reduce alcohol
      consumption and high risk drinking among adults who are enrolled as students in community
      colleges.
    

Detailed description: 
      Heavy alcohol use among community college students is a serious problem, leaving students
      vulnerable to social and health impairment, physical or sexual assault, unintentional
      injuries, and death. However, there have been limited efforts to research and treat community
      college students, despite these students comprising nearly 40% of all college students
      nationwide. Community college students are diverse in ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status,
      living situation, and employment status. Thus, successful interventions must be sufficiently
      flexible to apply across a diverse array of individual characteristics and needs.
      Unfortunately, there is evidence of great unmet need among this group; community college
      students drive under the influence of alcohol more frequently than students at four-year
      colleges, and due to lesser time spent on campus, are less available for in-person
      interventions coordinated at their college. The long-term objective of this research program
      is to address a gap in the treatment of heavy alcohol use by the community college
      population. As a first step toward achieving that goal, this R21 application will develop an
      intervention that is tailored to the needs of community college students and which uses
      mobile communications platforms that are already used by the vast majority of this
      population. Taking this approach, the intervention will be mobile, accessible wherever the
      user is located, and able to be tailored to individual characteristics. The investigators
      will begin by presenting out initial intervention design to focus groups (4 groups heavy
      drinking community college students) and obtaining feedback from key informants (advisory
      board). The investigators will use feedback from these groups to finalize the design and
      develop a working prototype, and will then pilot the intervention among heavy drinking
      community college students (N=10) for six weeks to test the usability and acceptability of
      the prototype intervention. Participants will be interviewed at the end of the program to
      provide feedback and evaluate their experience with the system, and content experts will
      again evaluate the prototype using semi-structured interviews. Finally, the investigators
      will pilot the modified intervention with heaving drinking community college students (N=40)
      for six weeks. These participants will be randomly assigned to either the intervention
      program or a standard intervention (print self-help) with a contact-control. Assessments will
      be conducted at end-of-treatment, and at 3 and 6 months follow up. These data will be used to
      guide the planning of a full-scale clinical trial to test the efficacy and cost-effectiveness
      of the intervention in reducing hazardous drinking among community college students
    

Intervention name(s): TMAP; Mojo Texts
Intervention type(s): Behavioral; Behavioral
Intervention description(s): Text messages for Alcohol Risk Reduction; Motivational texts not alcohol related
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Prevention