Negative consequences from alcohol use continue to be a concern on university campuses in the USA. In this paper, we describe the development and formative evaluation of an ongoing event-specific bystander intervention to encourage personal and bystander protective behavioural strategies among college students.
Methods:
The Rams Take Care, Rams Take Action intervention takes place within the context of a US college football home game. The programme incorporates several empirically supported behaviour change strategies including motivational interviewing, public commitments and the use of branded merchandise. The programme is delivered by trained peer educators.
Participants:
The programme was evaluated by means of a survey of undergraduate students who obtained tickets to a home football game during the 2018 season (N = 595).
Results:
Students who pledged to engage in protective behavioural strategies, and subsequently remembered their pledge, reported greater use of both personal (i.e. using a sober driver) and bystander (e.g. encouraging friends to use the buddy system) protective behavioural strategies.
Conclusions:
This inexpensive, brief intervention holds promise for reducing the negative consequences of US college students’ alcohol use and raises the possibility that event-specific interventions could have broader preventive effects than previously documented.
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