This class will explore environmental, social and developmental factors that make college students’ drinking a unique phenomenon. With research coming from clinical, developmental, social, health and community psychology disciplines, students gain exposure to a range of psychological and research related issues.
Whether the current effort in California to legalize marijuana is successful or not, it seems ever more likely that California, or another State, will soon make that step. Indeed in many ways, medical marijuana has already opened the door to many challenges to traditional approaches to prevention. But with the apparently strong likelihood of passage, Proposition 19 forces the prevention field to grapple with substantial challenges. This course will explore the questions legalized marijuana will raise for prevention efforts, public health and health education and it will seek to identify as many research based answers to those as possible.
This course has been approved by the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc. (NCHEC) for 9 CHES Category I continuing education contact hours (CECH).
Using a functional framework, this course will introduce the three types of prevention objectives. It will relate these types to other ways of structuring a set of programs, policies and practices on campus, such as NIAAA's Tier system.
It is now widely recognized that the non-medical use of prescription medication represents the most challenging aspect of campus AOD programming. This course will explore the possible ways a campus can respond, drawing from the existing literature. Course in development.
This course will be a short introduction to survey methods for measuring alcohol and other drug use and abuse among college students. Topics will covering sampling methods, interaction modality, item construction and survey hosting. Existing standardized measures will be introduced as well. Web survey hosting by iPrevention will serve as examples. This course is currently in development.
