PULLMAN, Wash. – Researchers from the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University have received a $75,000 Great Plays Grant award from MillerCoors to study and evaluate strategies to prevent risky drinking behaviors among college students.
 Austin
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 Pinkleton
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 Hust
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The Great Plays Grant will fund a proposal by researchers with the Murrow Center for Media &Health Promotion Research, led by Erica Austin, Bruce Pinkleton, and Stacey J.T. Hust, communication professors at WSU.
Intended to identify and test the relative effectiveness of two different strategies designed to extend the WSU Greek community’s existing alcohol abuse prevention program, the project will explore how correcting misperceptions of peer behaviors among members of WSU’s Greek community can reduce alcohol consumption and associated risky behaviors among group members. The results are expected to provide a deeper understanding of how college-aged group members respond to campaign messages focused on substance prevention, thereby facilitating the design of more effective interventions.
The research award is the result of a competitive grant application process sponsored by MillerCoors and administered by the ABMRF/The Foundation for Alcohol Research, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to supporting research on the prevention of irresponsible drinking and the medical, social and behavioral effects of drinking. Established in 1982, ABMRF has supported research projects at more than 250 universities and research institutions.
“Washington State University received this competitive award because of its innovative approach to preventing risky drinking behaviors,” said Mack C. Mitchell Jr., MD, President of ABMRF. “Our expert panel selected the research proposal from Washington State University due to its inclusion of a strong evaluation component and basis in a thorough literature review.”
Stacey J.T Hust, associate professor of communication at WSU and a project researcher, said the center’s grant proposal was made viable by the fact that WSU has long maintained an existing alcohol abuse prevention program within its Greek community. The community receives significant organizational support from the WSU Center for Fraternity and Sorority Life, and currently has about 3,500 student members roughly 20 percent of the university’s student body.
“What MillerCoors and ABMRF wanted was a proposal to evaluate and improve on an existing abuse prevention program,” said Hust. “We chose the program within our Greek community because it provides us access to a sizeable and representative student population supported by a university infrastructure that is active and well-administered.”
To ensure reasonable participation rates, Austin said researchers will rely on the Center for Fraternity and Sorority Life (CFSL) to help generate initial pretest participation. Staff members at CSFL have successfully encouraged research participation in the past.
She said many campus-oriented alcohol abuse prevention programs focus on correcting students’ overestimation of their peers’ alcohol consumption in an attempt to encourage students to adjust their own drinking behavior, while some campaigns also emphasize the extent to which college students misperceive the extent to which other students approve of alcohol consumption and associated risky behaviors.
“Existing studies have not compared the two approaches to determine whether one is demonstrably more effective than the other,” Austin said. “To intervene effectively to prevent underage and risky alcohol consumption among college students requires a better understanding of mechanisms behind more and less successful campaigns.”
Pinkleton said that the project’s unique design will help campaign designers avoid strategies that can backfire.
“Even though research has established students’ beliefs about their peers’ behaviors are big motivators, campaigns that try to prevent risky drinking behaviors by changing students’ perceptions of what their peers do have had mixed results,” said Pinkleton. “This study will clarify why one strategy may work while another may backfire.”
The Murrow Center for Media & Health Promotion develops and evaluates health communication campaign strategies that make flexible use of a full range of media platforms to affect social development and quality of life. Projects funded by federal, state and private grants support graduate and undergraduate student involvement in campaign planning and research. Center faculty are top-ranked nationally by ComVista for research on advertising effects, substance abuse prevention and media literacy. The center’s research findings have been featured frequently in policy papers released by the American Academy of Pediatrics regarding the connections between the media and children’s health.
MillerCoors developed the Great Plays Grant program to encourage alcohol responsibility on college campuses. In addition to the research award, each year universities that partner with MillerCoors on responsible college sports marketing are eligible for a $10,000 grant to help fund programs already in place on campuses, such as drunk driving prevention and efforts to change students’ drinking behaviors and raise awareness of harmful behavior that results from dangerous levels of consumption. Great Plays grants were issued for the first time in 2012 and, to date, more than 20 grants have been awarded to colleges and universities across the country.