We interrupt Crisis Watch 2008 to bring you this important message

Interesting.

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We had these types of posters up all over when i was in college, the statistics always seemed so improbable tho ("Did you know 76% of students don't drink at all?") that we and everyoen we knew mocked them as obvious lies and went ahead and binge drank anyway.
Drinking and Driving is obviously different, but when it comes to just general anti drinking messages i think a person needs to be looking for an excuse not to drink for this sort of thing to have an impact.

... the university was able to get students to act more prudently. The researchers found that thousands fewer students did things like drive under the influence, get hurt in alcohol-related events and engage in unprotected sex after they'd been drinking.

um, how did the university determine that "thousands" fewer drove under the influence, etc?

One has to assume that we're talking about "self-reported" behaviors -- and the likelhood that respondents will give honest answers to the questions was probably significantly lower as a result of the anti-drinking campaign for numerous reasons -- not the least of which is the perception that if the research had shown that the campaign was ineffective, persuasion via ad campaign would likely have given way to "persuasion" via increases enforcement and penalties for alcohol consumption at any level.

Not that the campaign was ineffective -- by posting a sign that say "86% intervene" intervention becomes much more likely (even though that 86% consists of the people who only intervene when their friends are falling down drunk, the sign itself probably encouraged intervention with regard to people who were clearly intoxicated, but not completely impaired).

thanks Barbara....

another point to consider is that something like this "alcohol awareness program" seldom occurs in a vacuum -- they usually get implemented after tragedies associated with drinking (e.g. dorm resident falls into a coma and dies after binge drinking, or football hero dies in drunk driving accident), and its that tragedy, not the program, that changes behavior.

So if you start the experiment two months after the tragedy, and you ask the question "Have you driven intoxicated in the last year" you're going to get a lot of positive responses. Asking it a year later -- after the awareness program has been implemented, fewer positive answers could be the result awareness of the tragedy, not the awareness program. (in fact, its probably the result of both -- with the awareness program reinforcing the change in behavior that had already occurred.)

that makes sense Barbara -- the problem that I had was the "thousands of students" remark.

For instance, are alcohol related emergency room admissions down by "thousands of students"? Doubtful. Are they down? Sure. But you have to extrapolate the data and assume X number of drunk student drivers for each emergency room admission (maybe the campaign just made drunk drivers more careful!)