Although community college students drink less, on average, than 4-year college students, they experience equal levels of negative consequences from drinking. Text messaging (TM) is a new type of health promotion intervention to reduce alcohol use during critical times of day when student drinking occurs. TM interventions for college student drinking are largely untested, especially at community colleges. In the current study, TMs were used as a protective behavioral strategy (PBS) and evaluated for the feasibility and acceptability of their structure and content with community college students who reported hazardous drinking (alcohol use that exceeds 4+/5+ in 2 hours or 8+/15+ weekly for women/men).
The researchers tested participants’ response rates to TMs (feasibility), their rating of TMs (acceptability), and their impressions of the PBS usefulness (also a form of acceptability) [N=48]. The study further tested whether these outcomes differ when messages are selected by participants, by investigators, or by random procedure. Participants in all three conditions selected the time blocks and days when text messages would be sent to coincide with their individual drinking patterns. Two TMs were sent on three typical drinking days per week for two weeks. The first was tailored to the timeframe prior to drinking and the second was focused on PBS during or after drinking time. The majority of participants in all three conditions found the messages useful and rated their frequency and content as “just right.” Participants who had selected their own messages rated usefulness higher than those who received investigator-selected or randomly selected messages.
Study limitations included a small sample size, the variability in actual time of drinking and timing of messages, and the narrow focus on students with hazardous drinking behavior. A strength of this study is its demographically diverse sample.
Take Away: Text messages are useful as a protective behavioral strategy to reduce drinking among community college students when the students select the messages ahead of time and the messages are delivered during times when drinking is most likely to occur.