Setting: The United Kingdom (UK) government has acknowledged that there is a problem with excess alcohol consumption, in particular amongst young people. Higher education is an important health promotion setting in which to explore not only how sensible drinking patterns can be facilitated and embedded in students' current lifestyles but also how…

Social Greek-letter organizations, more commonly known as fraternities (male-only) and sororities (female-only), are a longstanding tradition at colleges and universities in the United States. They claim to instill leadership skills in and offer a support network for members. However, in this article Wesley Routon and Jay Walker state that…

College drinking and its adverse consequences on students' health and safety are important public health concerns in the USA. Thus far, there is little attention on exploring and addressing the cultural dimensions of college drinking. This study examines the construction of meaning of drinking among students to understand their perspectives of the…

Student-conduct administrators around the country are hailing restorative justice as the next big thing. A blend of mediation and restitution, it seeks to resolve a conflict by identifying the harms caused and devising, with suggestions from both victims and offenders, an agreement to repair them. Restorative justice not only offers an alternative…

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that alcohol use is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States and results in approximately 79,000 deaths annually. College students are at particular risk of alcohol-related consequences due to their heavy drinking tendencies, with multiple studies indicating over 40%…

Three experiments investigated the impact of anchors on students' estimates of personal alcohol consumption to better understand the role that this form of bias might have in social norm intervention programs. Experiments I and II found that estimates of consumption were susceptible to anchoring effects when an open-answer and a scale-response…

This article provides information on a decade of trends and prevalence of substance use at a Midwestern prohibitionist university. Trends were based on three data collection times, 1995, 2000, and 2005. This information was compared with results of a number of national surveys to identify trends in the data. Total averages for the prohibitionist…

Alcohol use among college students has maintained its place as a major issue in American higher education since its inception. Although dangerous drinking has always proliferated among college students, institutions have only provided alcohol and other drug (AOD) education and interventions encouraging students to adapt less harmful habits for a…

A central feature of the U.S. Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Violence Prevention is the promotion of multiple prevention strategies that affect campus and surrounding community environments as a whole and can, thereby, have a large-scale effect on the entire campus community. In outlining the…

For more than two decades the U.S. Department of Education has supported campus- and community-based prevention programs through a number of programs and activities. For example, in 1987 the Department convened the first annual National Meeting for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention in Higher Education as a forum to disseminate…

More than 1,700 students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related causes, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). These students succumb to alcohol poisoning, cardiac arrest, or injuries from falls off dorm room balconies or other heights on campus. The problem of binge drinking, defined…

This study explores the phenomenon of interpersonal violence associated with alcohol abuse and sorority membership at a midsized state university in the West. Using Millennial theory as the conceptual framework, 180 reflection papers from women in two sororities were analyzed using qualitative content analysis to determine how they applied harm…

Objective: The authors examined whether alcohol-related negative consequences decreased among students exposed to an intervention. Participants: Beginning in 1999, approximately 2,500 randomly selected undergraduates from a 4-year US university annually participated in a Web-based survey over 6 years. Methods: The educational intervention used…

Raising the legal drinking age nationally was designed to decrease highway deaths, but it has not seemed to have affected the drinking behavior of 18-20 year old college students. In August of 1995, the Louisiana legislature raised the legal minimum drinking age to 21. This provided a unique opportunity to examine the effects of a change in legal…

Reviews the extent of underage drinking and alcohol abuse by college students currently and in an historical perspective. Profiles of those individuals and groups most at risk for problem drinking are suggested. Provides examples of efforts to prevent or reduce collegiate drinking, including campus-community coalitions, environmental management…