Professor outlines strategies to study, treat alcohol abuse

11/06/07 -Mark Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, spoke about the difficulties and procedures in studying alcohol abuse in the collegiate setting at the Multicultural Center yesterday.He said that a brief motivational intervention, or BMI, is the most effective method of reducing excessive drinking among incoming freshmen for instilling any kind of lasting effect.

This method involves light conversation with students that asserts not only the dangers of drinking excessively, but also questions them as to why they drink in the first place and interjects ways for a student to decrease heavy drinking habits.

Wood showed an image of the first recorded intervention method, which involved taking the town drunk and making him wear a wine barrel around the village until he reduced his consumption.

"The rationale being that if you want to live in a wine cask, well, you have to live in a wine cask," he said. "I just pray that they don't get wind of this in Narragansett."

Wood said that the most important factor that contributes to or reduces alcohol misuse among adolescents is from their parents, either from direct observations of parents' drinking habits or conversations about alcohol consumption. He said these factors were more influential on a person's drinking habits than peer influences during their youth.

Quoting Mark Twain, Wood said, "When I was 14 my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around, but by the time I got to be 21 I was amazed at how much he had learned in those seven years."

Wood said that in studying parental influences on student drinking there were two questions that he and his fellow researchers intended to answer. Firstly what level of permissiveness concerning alcohol can lead to excessive drinking, and second, what level of monitoring is needed to help curtail alcohol misuse?

"We found, at least in these cross-sectional analyses, these parental involvement factors predicted beyond the social influence variables that we've been looking at before," he said. "Perceived parental monitoring in this group of heavy drinkers we sampled were associated with less heavy drinking and alcohol problems later on."

The limitation of course with implementing a parent-based monitoring system is that there is no way to get reliable long-term data from the parents, because that would take a lifetime of study, Wood said.

Wood also said that the rate of heavy drinking increases dramatically when studying the fraternity and sorority life. He said that the combination of the ability to choose who hangs out with whom and the social situations that go along with Greek life complement each other to produce an environment where drinking heavily is not only accepted but highly encouraged.

"Greek involvement is consistently associated with higher levels of alcohol use among college students," he said. "Even people not directly associated with a fraternity or sorority and just attend the events are more likely to drink excessively than students with no Greek affiliation."

Wood said that there are about 1,700 deaths, 696,000 injuries and 97,000 sexually motivated assaults occurring each year with direct relation to alcohol misuse. He attributed these statistics to Ralph Hingson, Director of the Epidemiology and Prevention Research Division at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

"This is a time of life, inside of college and outside, where a lot of alcohol use and misuse is going on," Wood said. "Our interventions tend to focus on harm reduction outcomes, meaning that we are trying to reduce negative consequences during a developmental period of enhanced risk."

Mark Wood is actively involved in both the Transitions and the Common Ground programs at URI, through which he continues his research on alcohol-related problems.