Impact Discussion -- Can we also demonstrate
immediate impact?
Short term impact can be demonstrated by
examining differences between students coming in the door at orientation and two months
into the fall term.The next slide
shows this difference before and after our social norms intervention.
The
“expected” increase in student drinking when arriving at college can be
seen in our 1996 data.However, after
we began our social norms campaign, including intensive orientation and co-curricular
programming, we saw no significant difference in drinking behavior
between high school and two-month-matriculated first year students.Thus, we eliminated the commonly observed
increase in high risk drinking as students move into college.