Web-based Personalized Feedback for University Students

Excessive alcohol consumption in university students continues for be a serious public health concern with a variety of negative consequences. There have been a number of different brief interventions developed to address this issue among university students. The current project will add to this literature by evaluating the use of a personalized feedback intervention (www.CheckYourDrinkingU.net; CYDU). Specifically, this trial will examine whether providing access to the CYDU will result in short-term reductions in drinking. This issue is important as use of these interventions is not a mandatory requirement for university students so the issue is whether making materials of this type available leads to any reductions in risky drinking. It is hypothesized that students provided access to the CYDU will display greater reductions in drinking at a six-week follow-up as compared to students who were not provided access to the CYDU.

The CYDU is an internet-based intervention that provides a personalized feedback summary which compares the participant's drinking to that of other university students. The CYDU is a modified version of the Check Your Drinking screener which has been validated in four separate randomized controlled trials. The primary modification of the CYDU is that the population norms used for comparison are those of university students (in the USA or Canada).

AUDIT-C is a scale that is a composite of three items - frequency of alcohol use, drinks per drinking day, and frequency of 5+ drinking occasions. Scores ranges from 0 to 12 with higher scores indicating more severe alcohol problems.

Cunningham JA, Neighbors C, Bertholet N, Hendershot CS. Use of mobile devices to answer online surveys: implications for research. BMC Res Notes. 2013 Jul 8;6:258. doi: 10.1186/1756-0500-6-258.

Cunningham JA, Hendershot CS, Murphy M, Neighbors C. Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of providing access to a brief personalized alcohol feedback intervention in university students. Addict Sci Clin Pract. 2012 Oct 10;7(1):21. doi: 10.1186/1940-0640-7-21.