Measurement of Environmental Change Related to College

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Measurement of Environmental Change Related to
College Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) Prevention
Efforts
Linda Langford, Sc.D. Higher Education Center for
Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention llangford_at_edc.or
g www.edc.org/hec American Public Health
Association October 23, 2001
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Environmental Change Is a Key Component of Campus
AOD Prevention

• Knowledge, attitudes, intentions
• Environmental change
• Health protection
• Intervention and treatment

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Assumption

• Changing environmental contributors to AOD
  problems will result in individual behavior
  change.

Change in environment
Change in individuals
Environmental change activity
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Five Broad Strategies for Environmental Change

• Increase enforcement of laws and policies
• Restrict marketing and promotion of alcohol
• Change the normative environment and correct
  misperceived social norms
• Limit alcohol availability
• Offer alcohol-free social, recreational, and
  extracurricular options

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Each Strategy Includes Many Possible Activities
or Approaches

• Example Alcohol Availability
• Increase price, through
• taxes
• voluntary bar agreements
• ban happy hours
• Decrease commercial availability, through
• sting operations
• etc.

Prevention activities should be chosen to match
specific problems identified by a problem
analysis.
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Evaluation Challenges for Environmental Change
Efforts

• Funders/administrators want individual-level
  outcomes
• But individual measures (in traditional
  designs) may be poor indicators of program
  success
• multiple initiatives
• lack of valid comparison groups
• long time-frame until measurable individual
  change

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One Solution Measure Change in the Environment
Itself

• Domains of measurement
• Alcohol-free options
• Normative environment
• Alcohol availability
• Marketing and promotion of alcohol
• Development and enforcement of laws and policies

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Why Measure the Environment?

• Identify problems in the environment
• Motivate people to change the environment
• More immediate measure of success of
  environmental change efforts
• Examine the program theory of environmental
  change efforts
• Validate individual-level measures

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Environmental Scanning Problem Analysis/Needs
Assessment

• Use scanning tools to create profiles of
• campus risks
• alcohol availability and promotion
• media environment
• neighborhood environments
• drinking/party environments
• alcohol outlet risks
• Scanning Guide and Tools
• College Alcohol Risk Assessment Guide (CARA)

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Measuring Environmental Outcomes

• Theres no one way to measure a given outcome
• Particularly an outcome like reduced
  availability, which can be defined many ways
• Appropriate measurement must be determined in the
  context of a particular intervention
• Most useful to specify a process for identifying
  environmental measures

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Process for Identifying Environmental Measures

• 1. Identify changes expected
• Specify how activities will lead to long-term
  outcomes
• Identify which are changes in the environment
• 2. Identify possible indicators for these changes
• 3. Identify possible data sources for these
  indicators
• 4. Evaluate the appropriateness and quality of
  indicators and data sources

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How can we learn about the environment?
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Example Measures Enforcement

• Archival
• campus arrests
• city arrests
• special enforcement operations

• Self-report
• perceived risk of campus citation
• perceived risk of DWI arrest
• (underage) perceived risk of purchasing alcohol

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Example Measures Availability

• Archival
• campus pub pricing
• price at bars catering to college students
• underage sales surveys

• Self-report
• alcohol easy/hard to get
• alcohol expensive
• (underage) easy/hard to drink at campus pub

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Example Measures Promotion

• Archival
• advertisements on bulletin boards
• newspaper advertisements

• Self-report
• perceived advertising bulletin boards
• perceived advertising newspaper

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Creating Valid and Reliable Measures of the
Environment

• Scanning tools are good for problem
  identification
• Using them as pre/post measures is problematic
• Need to
• Create systematic procedures and forms
• Test inter-rater reliability
• Ask does it measure what you want to measure?
• Examine does it change in response to
  intervention? What is the time frame of change?