Ohio College Initiative to Reduce High Risk Drinking:

Environmental Strategies

• Environmental Strategies Intro
• Offering alcohol-free social, extracurricular, and public service options
• Creating a health-promoting normative environment
• Restricting the marketing and promotion of alcoholic beverages both on and off campus
• Limiting alcohol availability
• Increasing enforcement of laws and policies

Strategy #2 - Creating a health-promoting normative environment

One of the long-held beliefs about college campuses is that high risk drinking is a common occurrence among most every student. That belief is based in perception, not reality. Research shows that the number of students who drink in a high risk manner and the number of times they do so is consistently lower than the perceptions of students and other campus community members.

The danger in that faulty perception is that people often make choices based on what they perceive to be the normative behavior within their environment. Students who believe that most college students are drinking in a high risk manner - and doing so often - are more likely to drink in a high risk manner themselves.

Creating a health-promoting normative environment challenges those perceptions, both by providing factual information about drinking within the campus community and by structuring campus life to encourage low risk drinking choices.

Examples of this strategy:

Class schedules:
Increasing the number of classes offered on Fridays. If students have no or few classes on Fridays, high risk drinking on Thursday nights carries fewer consequences.

Social norms campaigns:
Publicizing the actual rates of high risk - or low risk - drinking within the campus community through posters, web messages and other media. These campaigns help provide a more accurate impression of drinking patterns within the campus community, which can lead to reduced consumption.

Substance-free housing:
Creating substance-free floors or dormitories for students who want to live in an alcohol-free environment.

Proceed to Strategy #3 >>