A quasi-randomized group trial of a brief alcohol intervention on risky single occasion drinking among secondary school students.

OBJECTIVES: To show the effectiveness of a brief group alcohol intervention. Aims of the intervention were to reduce the frequency of heavy drinking occasions, maximum number of drinks on an occasion and overall weekly consumption. METHODS: A cluster quasi-randomized control trial (intervention n = 338; control n = 330) among 16- to 18-year-old secondary school students in the Swiss Canton of Zürich. Groups homogeneous for heavy drinking occasions (5+/4+ drinks for men/women) consisted of those having medium risk (3-4) or high risk (5+) occasions in the past 30 days. Groups of 8-10 individuals received two 45-min sessions based on motivational interviewing techniques. RESULTS: Borderline significant beneficial effects (p < 0.10) on heavy drinking occasions and alcohol volume were found 6 months later for the medium-risk group only, but not for the high-risk group. None of the effects remained significant after Bonferroni corrections. CONCLUSIONS: Group intervention was ineffective for all at-risk users. The heaviest drinkers may need more intensive treatment. Alternative explanations were iatrogenic effects among the heaviest drinkers, assessment reactivity, or reduction of social desirability bias at follow-up through peer feedback.

The motivation to learn as a self-presentation tool among Swiss high school students : The moderating role of mastery goals' perceived social value on learning

Although it has been assumed that the motivation to learn - or mastery goal endorsement - positively predicts learning achievement, most empirical findings fail to demonstrate this relationship. In the present research, conducted in a Swiss high school, we adopted a social value approach to test the hypothesis that adolescent students' mastery goals do in fact predict learning, but only if these goals are perceived as highly useful for scholarly success (high social utility), and are not endorsed as a means to be appreciated by the teachers (low social desirability), a finding that has previously been observed among college students and on teacher-graded achievement measures only. Results demonstrate that in spite of potential peculiarities of an adolescent population, individual differences in mastery goals' perceived social utility and desirability moderate the mastery goal endorsement-learning achievement relation. Findings are discussed with regard to both theory development and educational practice.

Measuring alcohol-related consequences in school surveys: alcohol-attributable consequences or consequences with students' alcohol attribution.

In alcohol epidemiology surveys, there is a tradition of measuring alcohol-related consequences using respondents' attribution of alcohol as the cause. The authors aimed to compare the prevalence and frequency of self-attributed consequences to consequences without self-attribution using alcohol-attributable fractions (AAF). In 2007, a total of 7,174 Swiss school students aged 13-16 years reported the numbers of 6 alcohol-related adverse consequences (e.g., fights, injuries) they had incurred in the past 12 months. Consequences were measured with and without attribution of alcohol as the cause. The alcohol-use measures were frequency and volume of drinking in the past 12 months and number of risky single-occasion (> or =5 drinks) drinking episodes in the past 30 days. Attributable fractions were derived from logistic (> or =1 incident) and Poisson (number of incidents) regression analyses. Although relative risk estimates were higher when alcohol-attributed consequences were compared with nonattributed consequences, the use of AAFs resulted in more alcohol-related consequences (10,422 self-attributed consequences vs. 24,520 nonattributed consequences determined by means of AAFs). The likelihood of underreporting was higher among drinkers with intermediate frequencies than among either rare drinkers or frequent drinkers. Therefore, the extent of alcohol-related adverse consequences among adolescents may be underestimated when using self-attributed consequences, because of differential attribution processes, especially among infrequent drinkers.