Spring Break
Professor outlines strategies to study, treat alcohol abuse
Jeff Sullivan
Issue date: 11/6/07 Section: Campus
- Page 1 of 2 next >
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."
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."
