Currently, there exists relatively scant sociological research on the identities of first-year UK university students, and specifically those holding a strong Christian identity. Employing a symbolic interactionist framework, this article explores issues of identity construction amongst a group of first-year undergraduate students based at a UK…

In 2006, the Hawai'i State Department of Health (DOH) received the Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive Grant (SPF-SIG) from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to establish a comprehensive, coordinated, and sustainable substance abuse prevention infrastructure in Hawai'i. The SPF-SIG Project is funded…

The majority of parents report that they believe they have an important role in shaping adolescents' values and behaviours in relation to drinking, but they also report that they need more support in this area. Education, welfare, health, youth and other professionals have an important role in providing services to young people and/or their…

In 2002 the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) issued a groundbreaking report, "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges." This report was developed by the NIAAA-supported Task Force on College Drinking after three years of intensive discussions. It described new understanding of dangerous…

This article adapts the stages of change model, a model in which specific interventions of harm reduction are directed toward the client's readiness for treatment, as a guiding framework for counseling family members of alcoholics/addicts. Interventions at each stage of the family's readiness for change, from precontemplation to action, are…

Social Service agencies have been reluctant to focus on alcoholism as an issue in treating client and family problems, although there are 48 million alcoholics in the U.S., and 7 million of them are under age 18. Reasons for the reluctance to focus on alcoholism include lack of knowledge, poor prognosis, nihilism, denial, social workers' fears of…

The Join Together Policy Panel on Preventing Substance Abuse has formulated six recommendations that can facilitate community efforts to prevent substance abuse. These recommendations are directed to federal, state, and local policymakers and the communities they serve. The recommendations are: (1) federal, state, and local policies should…

This report discusses the need for an alcohol and drug use prevention program at the University of Michigan and presents findings from a task force that was established to investigate the problem of student alcohol and other drug use and identify areas where priority should be given for action. The opening section of the report presents the…