Abstract
A randomized controlled trial, using parent-based intervention (PBI) was designed to reduce the incidence of alcohol-involved sexual victimization among first-year college students. The PBI, adapted from Turrisi et al. (2001), was designed to increase alcohol-specific and general communication between mother and daughter. Female graduating high school seniors and their mothers were recruited from the community and randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Alcohol PBI (n = 305), Enhanced Alcohol + Sex PBI (n = 218), Control (n = 288) or Unmeasured Control (n = 167). Mothers in the intervention conditions were provided an informational handbook and encouraged to discuss its contents with their daughters prior to college matriculation. Consistent with hypotheses, PBI, either standard or enhanced, was associated with lower incidence of incapacitated rape in the first year of college relative to controls. Path analysis revealed support for a hypothesized indirect effects model, by which intervention increased mother-daughter communication, which predicted lower frequency of first semester heavy episodic drinking, resulting in lower rates of alcohol-involved sexual victimization in the first year of college.
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Notes
Because of our reliance on public telephone directories, we were unable to recruit students without landlines and whose last names differed from their parents’, resulting in a large proportion of stable, two-parent families and few single-parent or blended families. Accordingly, we located fewer of the targeted students who attended schools in the relatively impoverished city of Buffalo (30.5% located) compared to the suburbs (50.7% located), Z = 10.43, p < .01. However, once located, students from city schools were more likely to agree to participate (90.1%) than students from suburban schools (80.7%), Z = 3.38, p < .01.
At the end of each year of data collection, preliminary analyses were done to compare the two intervention conditions on key outcome and mediating variables. Consistent with the findings reported in the Results section, these revealed no differences between the two intervention conditions in the first three cohorts. Hence, we opted to drop the enhanced intervention condition in the final cohort.
We presume that daughters’ willingness to communicate with their mothers reflects the mothers’ ability to facilitate communication and elicit information from daughters. In a separate but comparable sample of first-year college students (n = 235), we assessed not only daughters’ willingness to communicate with their mothers about school, social activities, personal issues, romantic relationships, and personal problems, but also corresponding questions about how often their mothers asked them about these topics during the first semester of college. These measures were correlated significantly (r = .60), suggesting congruence between daughters’ willingness to communicate with their mothers and mothers’ strategies for facilitating communication.
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Acknowledgement
We thank Florence Leong for her management of recruitment and data collection.
Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism, Washington, DC, June 2008.
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This research was supported by grant R01 AA014514 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
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Testa, M., Hoffman, J.H., Livingston, J.A. et al. Preventing College Women’s Sexual Victimization Through Parent Based Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Prev Sci 11, 308–318 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-010-0168-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-010-0168-3