Mission, Strategy and Goals
The “Environmental Approaches to Prevention” national research Center Grant, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism since 1983, enabled the founding of the Prevention Research Center and continues to lead in the development of core PRC research programs in the 21st Century. The Center Grant is designed to include research at a variety of levels of aggregation and complexity. The Component Directors are committed to the development of integrated archival and individual level data acquisition approaches in all components of the planned studies.
Director: Mallie J. Paschall, Ph.D.
Environmental Approaches to Prevention
The “Environmental Approaches to Prevention” Research Center has been continuously funded for over 40 years by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to investigate environmental causes and correlates of alcohol use, abuse, and alcohol-related problems in communities in the United States. The current Center grant round includes interrelated projects designed to further enhance our understanding of the role that social and physical environments play in determining how people use alcohol and the kinds of problems they experience related to alcohol in community settings.
Communities across the US are increasingly aware of the health and social problems related to alcohol use. Alcohol related traffic crashes, of course, are a visible and well-known consequence of the risky or inappropriate use of alcohol. Other costly problems related to alcohol use include other accidental injuries, child abuse and neglect, interpersonal violence, risky sexual behaviors, underage use and problems related to underage drinking, addiction and chronic disease. Throughout its history, PRC research projects have defined the cutting edge of scientific efforts to design novel environmental approaches to the reduction of alcohol-related problems through changes in the economic, social and physical environments in which people drink. PRC researchers recognize that these social environments have a major influence on individual behaviors and alcohol problems throughout the life course. Changing these environments for the better, we can improve public health and save lives.
In the new Center Grant we’re applying an opportunities and constraints approach to better understand the social ecology of alcohol and other substance use, and how different types of environmental prevention strategies may affect alcohol use and related problems. This approach extends availability theory, which posits that increasing the full costs of obtaining alcohol in economic, physical, legal and social domains will reduce levels of alcohol use and related harms. Going beyond availability theory, we will investigate how regulatory or institutional policies may constrain or increase alcohol availability in these domains, and how those constraints and opportunities may influence how people obtain alcohol, the contexts and situations in which they consume alcohol, and risks related to drinking in those contexts.
The figure below includes some examples of alcohol regulatory policies that can shape opportunities and constraints for alcohol availability in the four domains. The figure also indicates that individuals or groups may adapt to these opportunities and constraints and shift the manner in which they obtain alcohol and drinking contexts. Behavioral adaptation may also be influenced by opportunities and constraints that relate to locational, situational, and social characteristics of drinking contexts, and how individuals respond to drinking consequences. These formal and informal systems operating at macro- and micro- levels create opportunity structures that can influence when, where, and how much people drink and risks for problems.
Research Goals and Activities
In its current five-year grant, PRC is focusing upon identifying answers to the following questions:
- How do formal and informal systems operating at macro- and micro- levels affect alcohol and other substance use among young adults in weekend nighttime drinking contexts before and after legal drinking age?
- How do local alcohol and marijuana policies, enforcement activities, and retail markets affect alcohol and marijuana use and co-use among 15- to 20-year-olds over time?
- What kinds of ethnic differences in alcohol and marijuana use and co-use result from local policy environments, alcohol and cannabis markets, and enforcement activities among Latinx and non-Hispanic 18- to 39-year-olds over time?
- How do life transitions, health and drinking history, living situations and institutional policies affect alcohol availability and opportunities for alcohol and other substance use in a cohort of 60- to 85-year-olds?
- To what extent do alcohol sales, alcohol outlet density, types of outlets, and spatial availability of alcohol affect community problems, using decades of geocoded data?
- In sharing findings of research on alcohol use, which types of information content, format, and media outlets are most useful to policy-makers and other stakeholders?
See the sidebar for details on projects addressing these topic of research.
