While efforts are typically focused on the delivery of interventions directly to students, this study takes a different approach at collegiate alcohol prevention by intervening at the parental level. Research indicates that parents remain influential to their children, even throughout college. Research also suggests that parents (like students) have many misperceptions about their college-aged children’s alcohol use. Correcting these alcohol-related misperceptions may motivate parents to communicate more with their college-aged children about drinking. This study uses social norms theory to develop and test an online parent-based personalized normative feedback intervention for parents of incoming first-year college students. A total of 399 student-parent dyads participated in the study and received either the control or the intervention condition. In the intervention condition, parents received statistics on the proportion of students who reported drinking prior to college and those who drank before the legal drinking age. They were then provided with personalized feedback on their perceptions of how much their own child would drink in college and how much the typical student reports drinking. Parents also received feedback regarding their approval of their child’s alcohol use compared to parents of other same-college students. Lastly, feedback was provided with regard to the proportion of parents who talk about their alcohol-related expectations with their children and the frequency they discuss the consequences of drinking. The control condition received norms related to student exercise, diet, and sunscreen use. Students and parents were surveyed at baseline, one month into college, and six months into college. Students were asked about their alcohol use, negative alcohol-related consequences, communication frequency with their parents, and whether or not their parent had discussed the intervention materials with them. Parents were asked how much they though their child would drink in college, their estimated proportion of other parents who had spoken to their children about alcohol expectations, whether they planned to change how they approached alcohol-related conversations with their child, and whether they planned to have those conversations more often. The majority of parents (82.7%) reported they planned to talk to their child more often about alcohol and 75.7% would change the way they talked about it. Parents’ perceptions of their student’s maximum drinking increased from pre to posttest for the parents that received the intervention. Parents in the intervention group also increased their perception of the proportion of parents who talk to their children about alcohol. For all of the student outcomes, there were no significant effects on alcohol use or consequences, and communication frequency decreased over time regardless of condition received. Nearly half of students in both conditions reported their parents discussed the materials with them. Of the intervention students, 26.3% reported their parents conveyed permissive messages about alcohol and only 12.6% reported their parents conveyed disapproving messages focused on abstinence.
Take away: This parent-based intervention was successful at motivating parents to engage in conversations about alcohol, but may have inadvertently encouraged more permissive communication between parents and their college-aged children. The normative information provided may have conveyed to parents that their child would inevitably drink, resulting in more conversations about drinking safely as opposed to abstinence messages. Similar interventions should include information on how to talk to students about alcohol and the most effective messages for influencing outcomes.