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March 22, 1999
During a recent UCSC conference on drug and alcohol use on college campuses, keynote speaker and health educator Michael Haines gestured toward a large glass nearly filled with neon-orange liquid. According to Haines, traditional drug and alcohol education programs tend to focus on the empty part of the glass, raising the specter of extreme consequences such as car wrecks and date rape. Haines explained his success with a very different approach, one that focuses on the full part of the glass.
Haines, coordinator for Health Enhancement Services at Northern Illinois University (NIU), spoke earlier this month at a conference at Porter College. Titled, "What's the Buzz?," the conference was attended by nearly 200 people, including college administrative officers, Student Affairs staff, students, UCSC and Santa Cruz police, and health educators from Santa Cruz prevention programs and from Santa Clara and Golden Gate Universities.
"Every effective program says to model the behavior you want students to adopt. But I'd go so far as to say you don't even have to ask them to adopt the behavior, it's already there," Haines said. To illustrate his point, Haines cited statistics showing that students have a much lower rate of DUI incidents than their parents and the majority of students who drink don't exceed legal limits. In fact, Haines said, college campuses are one of the safest environments for young people.
According to Haines, exaggerations and misperceptions can actually perpetuate more extensive drug and alcohol use, while educating students about the actual use and lower social acceptability of alcohol and drug use may diminish use.
Haines tried traditional educational approaches unsuccessfully at NIU for a time but he changed his tack after learning about research by H. Wesley Perkins, professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Perkins's research shows that college students consistently overestimate the extent of substance use among their peers and tend to model their behavior after what they perceive as the norm. "If you change the perception of the norm, you change the behavior," Haines explained.
UCSC presents a perfect example of the situation Haines described. Although saddled with a label for years as a school with unusually high drug use, UCSC actually ranks well below the national norm in a number of studies. The 1997 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study determined that more than half (62.6 percent) of UCSC students report that they do not engage in binge drinking (identified as having five or more drinks in a sitting), and many do not drink at all. This places UCSC in the study's second quintile of schools for binge drinking, with the first quintile representing the lowest rates of use and the fifth quintile representing the highest rates of use. In another, campus-based, study from 1993, less than half of UCSC students reported smoking marijuana in the previous year. Yet a recent informal survey of student perception conducted here by the Princeton Review reflected a common misconception of the campus, ranking UCSC number one in the category of "Reefer Madness."
"We emphasize how normal it is to be moderate in your drinking behaviors and how normal it is to care about other students," Haines said. "The messages are solution focused. What students want are policies that protect them. What they don't want is to be told not to drink. They want to know how to drink and not get DUI, how to drink and not get hurt, how to drink and not get sexually transmitted diseases. But never once have I had a student tell me, 'I want you to tell me how not to drink.' "
Haines's approach, what he calls the "Social Norms Model," emphasizes partnership between students and the institution. By disseminating accurate and helpful information, this approach influences people to change their drinking behavior to conform to a more accurate picture of the drinking behaviors of their peers. The approach has been adopted at the University of Arizona, Tucson, which recently reduced drinking on campus by 7 percent in one year. Another two dozen or so colleges across the U.S. are now in early stages of implementing this approach.
At the same time, Haines acknowledged that there are disruptive behaviors associated with drug and alcohol use and there are, of course, concerns on the part of college administrators over illegal behaviors, such as drinking by minors. Some schools have had success with a mix of the Social Norms Model and the implementation of policies addressing disruptive and illegal behavior.
"What's the Buzz" was sponsored by an ad hoc committee of staff, students, and faculty, according to organizer Imogen Church, acting college administrative officer at Crown. The next step, Church says, will be to develop a comprehensive approach for UCSC. That task will be handled by the Alcohol and Other Drugs Advisory Committee, a university committee that advises the Alcohol and Other Drugs Program and the vice chancellor of Student Affairs.