Clinical Research Directory

REAL Parenting Alcohol and Substance Use App

High school students' alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana use are major public health problems. Among the many consequences of these risky behaviors are impaired driving and impaired passenger fatalities as well as increased health risks. Both school administrators and parents have requested parent-based interventions (PBIs)for the general high school population that include content on alcohol, nicotine and marijuana use. In addition, digital materials are needed for the "on-the-go" parent. The proposed research will address this omission, curb the alarming trends noted above, and move the field forward by conducting a randomized controlled trial testing a modified, digital version of the Parent Handbook for the all high school students that includes additional content for parents to have broader discussions about combined alcohol nicotine and marijuana use alone (referred to as REAL Parenting). Parent-teen dyads will be invited to participate and complete baseline assessment and parents will receive the REAL Parenting or active control materials shortly afterwards. This will allow an examination of the impact of the RP on alcohol use, and associated consequences and sustained effects across the follow-up period.

Parent-Focused Alcohol Prevention Program for Hispanic Families in Faith-Based Settings

The goal of this clinical trial is to determine whether Guiando Buenas Decisiones, a parent-focused alcohol prevention program, can help prevent or delay alcohol initiation and use among Hispanic immigrant adolescents ages 12 to 14 from low-income families. The study will also examine how well the program can be implemented through a faith-based community organization. The main questions this study aims to answer are: 1. Does the refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program help prevent or delay alcohol initiation and use among adolescents? 2. Does the refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program improve family, individual, and sociocultural risk and protective factors related to adolescent alcohol use, as reported by parents and adolescents? 3. What individual- and organizational-level barriers and facilitators affect implementation of the refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program? 4. What are the reach, adoption, implementation, and maintenance outcomes of delivering the refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program through a faith-based community organization? The study will first conduct a small pilot to refine Guiando Buenas Decisiones and optimize the intervention and study procedures based on feedback from participating families. The study will then conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing families who receive the refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program with families assigned to a wait-list control group. Families in the wait-list control group will be offered Guiando Buenas Decisiones after completing the 6-month follow-up assessment. The refined Guiando Buenas Decisiones program consists of seven weekly sessions, each lasting approximately 2 hours, delivered by trained community health workers and lay church members. In the randomized trial, parents and adolescents will complete separate assessments at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and 6 months after the intervention. These assessments will examine adolescent alcohol initiation and use and family, individual, and sociocultural risk and protective factors related to adolescent alcohol use. Information will also be collected from parents, program facilitators, and organizational stakeholders to identify individual- and organizational-level barriers and facilitators to implementation and to assess implementation outcomes in a faith-based community setting.

Examining an Intervention to Reduce High School Drinking

Underage drinking is a significant problem in the United States. While past research supports the efficacy of interventions in delaying the initiation of alcohol use implemented in middle school and early high school, research shows drinking by older high schoolers is problematic and interventions for older high schoolers remain limited. The current project will test the efficacy of the e-CHECKUP TO GO (eCTG), alone and combined with an electronic-Parent-Based Intervention (ePBI), for junior and senior high school students using a nationally representative sample with the goal of reducing alcohol use and negative consequences.

Project e-PBI+ - Parent Intervention to Reduce College Student Drinking and Cannabis Use

College students' risky drinking and cannabis use are major public health problems. The harms associated with risky drinking have been well-documented (such as deaths, blackouts, injuries, assaults, arrests, sexual consequences, academic consequences). Both college health administrators and parents have requested electronic parent-based interventions (e-PBIs) with additional content on cannabis. Parents have demonstrated ample motivation to communicate with their teens. The proposed research will attempt to enhance an existing effective e-PBI, curb the alarming trends noted in the literature, and move the field forward by conducting a randomized controlled trial testing a modified version of the e-PBI that includes updated content including the most up-to-date scientific information from cannabis studies (e-PBI+).

Norms Re-education to Promote Engagement in Parent-based Interventions

A randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted to evaluate both the short-term and long-term efficacy of innovative, incentive-free parent-based interventions (PBIs) designed to reduce underage drinking on college campuses. Although the current NIAAA-recommended Parent Handbook has shown modest effects, our preliminary work suggests that combining personalized normative feedback (PNF) delivered through a social media-inspired app with psychoeducational content can effectively decrease alcohol-related risk. In this large, multi-site trial with 2,040 first-year students, we will examine the short- and long-term effects of the experimental app-based PNF program (PNF+ PBI) compared to an email-based social norms marketing campaign (SNMC+ PBI), the Parent Handbook (PH+ PBI), and an assessment-only control on alcohol use and consequences (primary outcomes). Parent alcohol approval and communication will also be assessed as potential mediators of intervention effects (secondary outcomes). The researchers hypothesize that students whose parents receive PNF+ and SNMC+ PBIs will report lower levels of alcohol use and fewer alcohol-related consequences compared to those whose parents receive PH+ PBI or no intervention. It is also expected that parental approval will be lower and alcohol-related communication will be higher in these two experimental conditions, relative to PH+ PBI and no intervention.

Parent Intervention to Reduce College Student Drinking and Consequences

College students' alcohol use continues to be a major public health problem. Among the many consequences of this risky behavior are impaired driving and impaired passenger fatalities. Both college health administrators and parents have requested parent-based interventions (PBIs), and parents have demonstrated ample motivation to communicate with their teens. The proposed research will attempt to enhance an existing effective PBI, curb the alarming trends noted in the literature, and move the field forward by conducting a randomized controlled trial testing a modified version of the PBI that includes additional content for parents to establish clear lines of communication around the important topic of permissiveness (referred to as P-Chat).

Revolutionizing Normative Re-education

Personalized Normative Feedback (PNF), the most widely-used college alcohol intervention approach, suffers from several limitations innovatively remedied in the current proposal through CampusGANDR, a smartphone-based app for college students that delivers alcohol-related PNF within a weekly game centered around testing first-year students' perceptions about the attitudes and behaviors of their peers in a variety of campus-relevant domains. Five pilot studies suggest that CampusGANDR will be significantly more effective at correcting students' normative misperceptions and reducing their alcohol use than standard PNF, especially among heavier-drinking students and those with greater exposure to alcohol on social media, and that these larger effects are driven by the significantly decreased psychological reactance experienced by students when viewing feedback as part of a game about college life rather than as part of an alcohol-focused program. The current project seeks to 1) evaluate the efficacy of CampusGANDR in a large-scale multi-site trial, 2) identify the optimal dosage of alcohol feedback to deliver within CampusGANDR for correcting norms and reducing alcohol use across 12 weeks of gameplay among non-drinking, moderate-drinking, and heavy-drinking students, 3) examine person-level moderators of these effects, and 4) evaluate CampusGANDR engagement and sustainability among students who play voluntarily but are not involved in the randomized controlled trial.

Digitally Prompted Parenting: A Text Message Parent-Based Alcohol Intervention for Incoming College Students

This pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) will evaluate both the feasibility and efficacy of Digitally Prompted Parenting (DPP), a text-message based parent intervention (tm-PBI) designed to prevent and reduce alcohol use among first-year college students. In this study, parents of incoming first-year students will receive risk-reducing text messages during the first 10 weeks of the Fall semester, which they can forward to their students. The trial uses a longitudinal design to compare drinking outcomes between students whose parents receive the DPP messages and those whose parents receive an established alcohol PBI (the active control condition). The investigators hypothesize that students in the DPP group will report lower levels of alcohol use and fewer alcohol-related consequences after the intervention compared to those in the active control group.