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BOSTON, MA - June 2, 2005 - Outside The Classroom, Inc. today launched Alcohol Innerview , a new online tool enabling colleges to provide brief motivational interventions (BMI) for students who have had drinking problems. The new BMI tool is available free of charge.
Developed by the same Outside The Classroom experts who created AlcoholEdu®, the leading online Population-Level Prevention® program for colleges and high schools, Alcohol Innerview is a personalized and confidential online feedback tool designed for brief (15- to 20-minute) interventions with students who have violated alcohol policies or have high-risk drinking patterns. Alcohol Innerview is an intervention designed to be used in conjunction with existing campus counseling services and judicial sanctioning programs.
Alcohol Innerview asks the student a number of assessment questions related to personal drinking behavior and then provides immediate feedback in the context of the typical responses of other students. The interview only takes minutes but provides the student with valuable personalized information and perspective on his or her behavior. Outside The Classroom provides college administrators with a free Alcohol Innerview account enabling them to sign on students, but students' responses and other personal information are completely confidential.
Alcohol Innerview highlights include:
- An easy-to-use online format
- Quick completion in 15-20 minutes
- Guaranteed confidentiality for students
- Personalized comparative feedback based on aggregate data from responses by more than 50,000 college students who completed AlcoholEdu in 2003-2004
- Immediate personal printouts or email feedback to the student upon completion
Different prevention for different purposes
There are distinct differences in strategy and purpose between primary prevention, where the idea is to prevent problems before they start, and secondary prevention, where the goal is to reduce the chances that a problem will happen again. In primary prevention, we address all students, helping them make healthy and safe choices to avoid alcohol-related problems; in secondary prevention, we address students whose drinking behavior has already caused problems. The end of this spectrum of prevention efforts is tertiary prevention, which includes counseling or treatment for students with dependency or addiction issues.
It's important that those working with prevention programs distinguish what they are trying to accomplish and with whom. Outside The Classroom has pioneered both the field of online alcohol prevention - as the first online provider in the country - and Population-Level Prevention, the strategy of providing a comprehensive primary prevention program to all students, regardless of their drinking status. AlcoholEdu for College, the company's Population-Level Prevention course, recently underwent the first independent, third-party evaluation of an online alcohol prevention program. The results, based on a study including more than 23,000 students, showed that the program significantly reduces negative health, social, and academic consequences of drinking.
BMIs are examples of secondary prevention; they are usually used to assist the limited number of students who come to the attention of a school's counseling or judicial services. BMIs should be used in conjunction with other secondary prevention programs, such as Outside The Classroom's AlcoholEdu for Sanctions, as well as tertiary prevention programs.
Brandon Busteed, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Outside The Classroom, said the company is providing Alcohol Innerview as a BMI tool that will supplement the services it already provides to colleges implementing Population-Level Prevention programs for all their students with AlcoholEdu. The company's core focus is as a comprehensive, full-service partner helping schools tackle the issue of high-risk drinking.
"Our customers who require all first-year students to complete AlcoholEdu for College as part of a Population-Level Prevention program have requested other online tools for use with students in counseling services and judicial programs," Busteed said. "They're interested in having a full suite of tools to use for different purposes at different times during the school year. By providing our own, cost-free BMI tool, Outside The Classroom is making it easier and more affordable than ever for colleges to quickly and seamlessly integrate brief motivational interventions into their overall comprehensive programming."
Busteed notes, however, that BMIs like Alcohol Innerview serve a different purpose than a program like AlcoholEdu for College. "Schools using a BMI shouldn't have the expectation that it will change the campus culture. That is done through Population-Level Prevention in conjunction with several other environmental management strategies."
Scott Walters, Ph.D., an expert in college health prevention and co-developer of the e-CHUG intervention, helped to develop Alcohol Innerview. "Alcohol Innerview gives personalized information about consumption, risk factors, and attitudes, so that students can begin to examine their own drinking," Walters said. "The intent of this unique tool is to help students consider their behaviors and how they might make changes."
Busteed noted that while there are currently choices in the secondary prevention market for online BMI tools, AlcoholEdu from Outside The Classroom remains the only comprehensive online primary prevention program delivering Population-Level Prevention to all students. AlcoholEdu features complete reporting of individual school population results. The data aggregated from all schools using AlcoholEdu for Population-Level Prevention constitutes the world's largest evaluative dataset on college student drinking behavior and is used for comparative feedback in Alcohol Innerview - another advantage of using the Outside The Classroom tool for brief motivational interventions.
"Secondary prevention with high-risk drinkers is a necessary and important element of any institution's programming," Busteed said. "At the same time, primary prevention programs reaching an entire school population before the fact are even more critical to addressing the college drinking crisis on a comprehensive, long-term, population-level basis. We have designed AlcoholEdu as the cornerstone of our customers' comprehensive prevention programs."
About Outside The Classroom
Outside The Classroom is the leading provider of online alcohol prevention programs and tools, offering primary and secondary prevention solutions for both college- and high-school-aged students. The company's flagship program, AlcoholEdu, is used at more than 450 colleges and 100 high schools around the country. Outside The Classroom collaborates with many prominent organizations, including the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).
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