Suchergebnisse

Responsible Beverage Service (RBS) refers to the idea that bars and restaurants may be able to have a significant impact on the levels of deaths and injuries associated with alcohol consump tion including, but not limited to alcohol-impaired driving. After a brief background on RBS as a prevention strategy, the authors review the different measures, protocols, and designs that have been employed in evaluations of responsible service programs with attention paid to the strengths and limitations accompanying each choice. This article concludes by describing the Prevention Research Center's Community Trials Project design as it relates to evaluating its RBS compo nent, and some of the unique considerations that influenced the measures and protocols employed. In so doing, the authors discover how the larger project serves as an interesting case study in action research.

This article presents results of a beverage server intervention project that attempted to reduce levels of alcoholic intoxication through a set of policy changes and server training. Outcome data were collected through the use of personal interviews and structured observations in two enlisted clubs, one receiving the intervention and one acting as the comparison group. Because of the logistics of the data collection, the pooled sample of observations and interviews reflects systematic method biases as well as self-selection effects. Probit regression to model method and self-selection biases is used to adjust for these two biases in the analysis of consumption measures for total alcoholic drinks, beers, and blood alcohol concentration.

This article provides recommendations and observations about evaluation of a locally based prevention project to reduce problems at a total community or aggregate level. The shift from targeting specific individuals or subpopulations to the overall structure and environment of a community is most demanding. Evaluation tools and analysis techniques have lagged behind program development because community-level interventions are not linked to a specific target group who can be separately studied. Thus assumptions about using random assignment and/or comparison communities as means to control for confounding variables are weakened when the unit of analysis is the community itself and dependent measures are subject to trending and the effects of history.

The Community Prevention Trial was 5-year effort to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and death through a comprehensive program of community awareness and policy activities. The three experimental communities were of approximately 100,000 population each (one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in South Carolina). Matched comparison communities were used for each experimental community. This article describes the evaluation approach used in a program that sought to change environmental factors not a specific population or target group. This approach demanded unique evaluation approaches for deter mining overall community aggregate effects, that is, distal outcomes, as well as changes in key mediating variables, that is, process effects. The problem of trending and lagged effects of community prevention programs are discussed.