Text Messaging as a Novel Alcohol Intervention for Community College Students (TMAP)

This project will develop an intervention delivered through text messaging to reduce alcohol consumption and high risk drinking among adults who are enrolled as students in community colleges.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Alcohol Use
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: TMAP; Behavioral: Mojo Texts

Detailed Description

Heavy alcohol use among community college students is a serious problem, leaving students vulnerable to social and health impairment, physical or sexual assault, unintentional injuries, and death. However, there have been limited efforts to research and treat community college students, despite these students comprising nearly 40% of all college students nationwide. Community college students are diverse in ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, living situation, and employment status. Thus, successful interventions must be sufficiently flexible to apply across a diverse array of individual characteristics and needs. Unfortunately, there is evidence of great unmet need among this group; community college students drive under the influence of alcohol more frequently than students at four-year colleges, and due to lesser time spent on campus, are less available for in-person interventions coordinated at their college. The long-term objective of this research program is to address a gap in the treatment of heavy alcohol use by the community college population. As a first step toward achieving that goal, this R21 application will develop an intervention that is tailored to the needs of community college students and which uses mobile communications platforms that are already used by the vast majority of this population. Taking this approach, the intervention will be mobile, accessible wherever the user is located, and able to be tailored to individual characteristics. The investigators will begin by presenting out initial intervention design to focus groups (4 groups heavy drinking community college students) and obtaining feedback from key informants (advisory board). The investigators will use feedback from these groups to finalize the design and develop a working prototype, and will then pilot the intervention among heavy drinking community college students (N=10) for six weeks to test the usability and acceptability of the prototype intervention. Participants will be interviewed at the end of the program to provide feedback and evaluate their experience with the system, and content experts will again evaluate the prototype using semi-structured interviews. Finally, the investigators will pilot the modified intervention with heaving drinking community college students (N=40) for six weeks. These participants will be randomly assigned to either the intervention program or a standard intervention (print self-help) with a contact-control. Assessments will be conducted at end-of-treatment, and at 3 and 6 months follow up. These data will be used to guide the planning of a full-scale clinical trial to test the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of the intervention in reducing hazardous drinking among community college students

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 65
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• United States
  • Rhode Island
    • Providence, Rhode Island, United States, 02903
      • The Miriam Hospital- CORO building

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 18 years to 28 years (Adult)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

• age 18 to 28 Community College student Consume at least 4 drinks in one sitting in the past week

Exclusion Criteria:

• none

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Prevention
• Allocation: Randomized
• Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: TMAP; Alcohol-related Text messages 4 days/week for 6 weeks	Behavioral: TMAP; Text messages for Alcohol Risk Reduction
Sham Comparator: Control; Motivational Text messages 4 days/week for 6 weeks	Behavioral: Mojo Texts; Motivational texts not alcohol related

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Time Frame
Number of heavy drinking episodes at six weeks	6 weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: The Miriam Hospital
• Collaborators: Live Inspired, LLC

Publications and helpful links

General Publications

• Bock BC, Rosen RK, Barnett NP, Thind H, Walaska K, Foster R, Deutsch C, Traficante R. Translating Behavioral Interventions Onto mHealth Platforms: Developing Text Message Interventions for Smoking and Alcohol. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2015 Feb 24;3(1):e22. doi: 10.2196/mhealth.3779.
• Bock BC, Barnett NP, Thind H, Rosen R, Walaska K, Traficante R, Foster R, Deutsch C, Fava JL, Scott-Sheldon LA. A text message intervention for alcohol risk reduction among community college students: TMAP. Addict Behav. 2016 Dec;63:107-13. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2016.07.012. Epub 2016 Jul 18.

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start: July 1, 2012
• Primary Completion (Actual): July 1, 2014
• Study Completion (Actual): June 1, 2015

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: July 22, 2015
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: July 22, 2015
• First Posted (Estimate): July 23, 2015

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): April 25, 2019
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: April 23, 2019
• Last Verified: July 1, 2015

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Additional Relevant MeSH Terms: Drinking Behavior; Alcohol Drinking
• Other Study ID Numbers: 1R21AA021014-01A1 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: NO