In this guest post Dr Richard Cooke, of the Department of Psychology at Aston University, explores the role of university student’s views of alcohol policies and initial findings from the CALIBRATE study.
Various alcohol control policies (e.g., increasing the price of alcohol, teaching people alcohol refusal skills, raising the legal drinking age) have been proposed to reduce hazardous alcohol consumption. Rarely are these looked at specifically in the context of university students specifically, despite significant media attention being focused on ‘binge drinking’ amongst younger drinkers.
Such control policies tend to be categorised as educational (e.g., teaching people alcohol refusal skills) or restrictive (e.g., raising the legal drinking age). Anderson et al.'s (2009) review of existing evidence found that restrictive policies were more effective at reducing alcohol-related harm than educational policies. However as has been seen with pricing debates, the views of the general population are often at odds with the evidence, leading to various policy dilemmas.
What do young people think about the effectiveness of alcohol control policies?
A recent study by de Visser et al. (2014) asked 16-21 year olds in England to report their perceptions of the effectiveness of eight alcohol control policies: enforce the law against serving drunk people; strictly monitor late-night licensed premises; teach people skills for resisting pressure to drink; restrict late night sales; increase the price of alcohol; reduce the number of outlets that sell alcohol; ban alcohol sponsorship; raise the legal drinking age. de Visser and colleagues found that young people rated enforcing the law against serving drunk people and monitoring late-night licensed premises as the most effective strategies. Raising the legal drinking age was rated the least effective policy.
Are there differences in ratings of alcohol control policies between people in different countries?
van der Sar et al. (2012) collected data on perceptions of alcohol control policies in the Netherlands and Norway. Participants in both samples were aged at least 24 years of age to avoid ratings being influenced by rating policies that might affect them. Participants in both countries gave more positive ratings of educational policies relative to restrictive policies, and there were few differences between the two countries. However, van der Sar et al. called for research to be conducted in more European countries to see if results differed between countries.
The CALIBRATE study
The CALIBRATE study, funded by the European Research Advisory Board, is a collaboration between researchers in several European countries. The study collected data on a range of variables, including perceptions of alcohol control policies, from a sample of European university students. For this analysis, data was available from 1930 students recruited from universities in Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. We included the items from de Visser et al. (2014) and three additional items: school-based alcohol education; alcohol treatment and relapse prevention; youth outreach drop-in programmes.
What did we find?
Alcohol treatment and relapse prevention was rated as the most effective policy. Raising the legal drinking age was rated as the least effective policy. Comparing results between countries showed that students in Southern Europe gave higher ratings of the effectiveness of policies relative to students in Northern Europe.
What do the results mean?
Our results replicate past research by showing that young people rate raising the legal drinking age as the least effective policy. Our results also highlight differences in ratings between university students in different countries; Northern Europeans viewed alcohol control policies as less effective compared to Southern Europeans. A recent paper by Braker and Soellner (2016) offers a potential explanation for these differencs. They argue that while there is growing harmonisation in alcohol control policies across Europe, there is variation in the strength of implementation of these policies (i.e., how strongly policies are enforced in countries). This means that university students in Italy may have different experiences of alcohol control policies than university students in Denmark, due to how policies are implemented, and this difference in experience could account for variation in perceptions of the effectiveness of these policies bgetween university students in the two countries.
What are the implications for alcohol control policies?
Data from the CALIBRATE study replicate past findings that restrictive policies are rated as less effective than educational policies. This is problematic because we know that restrictive policies are the most effective policies for reducing alcohol-related harm.
I believe we need to conduct qualitative work, similar to that done by Lonsdale et al. (2012) on minimum unit pricing and Lovatt et al. (2015) on low risk drinking guidelines, to explore why young people hold these perceptions of alcohol control policies. Current efforts such as the NUS impact scheme are likely to be hindered by student’s attitudes to control polices. Further work in this area will allow us to better understand why young people have such perceptions, and, find out what can be done to challenge them.
You can read more about the CALIBRATE project in this SHAAP/SARN briefing [pdf].
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