Abstract A04: Social activities and events and their role in determining health behavior adoption among minority college students
Authors: Ciecierski Christina , Hitsman Brian , Romero Daniel , Mubayi Anuj 
Published: March 2017

Cancer risk behaviors, including tobacco use, alcohol binge drinking, and physical inactivity, co-occur at high rates among racially and ethnically diverse college students. The overall goal of this paper is to develop a robust framework, founded on mathematical and computational models, to enhance our understanding of the social and environmental mechanisms that determine changes in health risk behavior, including alcohol binge drinking, tobacco use, and physical activity, among students enrolled in a commuter, federally designated Minority-Serving Institution in Chicago (Northeastern Illinois University, NEIU). Our underlying conceptual premise is that mutually affecting health risk behaviors spread interpersonally through social interactions and influences but can also occur spontaneously, through non-social contextual influences and increased time spent in high-risk settings. Our work acknowledges the existence of an adaptive dynamic culture of college students and incorporates a new metric, the distribution of time spent in distinct venues of students, to study its impact on population's health behaviors patterns. Our work characterizes, for the first time, social contexts of the NEIU students' diverse population and examines the effect of residence times in environments and contextual social networks on dynamics of multiple health behaviors. Our fall 2015 survey parses out social and environmental contextual pathways that are particularly relevant for college students and includes information on close friendships, peer health behavior, student allocations of time, engagement in activities on, near and off-campus and duration. Preliminary findings regarding environments in which students spend their time show that student smokers most often frequent on-campus fine arts events. All varieties of on-campus and near campus events reveal high participation rates of physically inactive students. Binge drinkers (defined as at least one episode of drinking 5 or more drinks in a row over the last 2 weeks) favored attending intercollegiate sports events over all other activity on or near campus. Intercollegiate sport events were most often frequented by students declaring multiple unhealthy behaviors. Our findings suggest to what extent (and where) interventions aimed at altering observed patterns of socialization (e.g. through tailored residence assignments or fraternity and sorority recruiting policies) and/or distribution of the times spent in students' potential environments (e.g., through sports or religious events) hold promise in controlling unhealthy behaviors among college students, especially, students of color.

Citation Format: Christina Ciecierski, Brian Hitsman, Daniel Romero, Anuj Mubayi. Social activities and events and their role in determining health behavior adoption among minority college students. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Ninth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2016 Sep 25-28; Fort Lauderdale, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2017;26(2 Suppl):Abstract nr A04.