Understanding Relationships between Colleges, Local Alcohol Policies, Drinking, and Health Outcomes

Project Description Narrative:

The goal of this project is to understand how municipal and college policies interact to shape the local alcohol environment, drinking rates and health outcomes, and to recommend ways to foster collaboration between colleges and municipalities to reduce underage and binge drinking and related harms, specifically among younger adults, and to return these results to the communities.

The project aims to address excessive alcohol use by young adults in Wisconsin by evaluating the community, environment and policy factors that contribute to binge drinking and underage alcohol use in Wisconsin cities with 4-year colleges and universities. The researchers involved in this project are part of the Comprehensive Injury Center (CIC) of MCW focused on reducing alcohol-related injury and negative health outcomes. Improving Wisconsin’s health requires a comprehensive strategy to reduce excessive alcohol use, including understanding how the relationship between a city and its college campuses can enable drinking excesses by teens and young adults.

This research study will: examine alcohol policies that affect young adults, both underage and in their early 20s; compare the patterns of alcohol policies in college campuses and college cities versus those in cities without four-year colleges; examine patterns of excessive drinking and its harms in the selected cities; analyze relationships between the patterns of policies and practices and their outcomes; and create and disseminate evidence-informed policy and practice recommendations.