Effectiveness of public health campaigns in reducing adolescent binge drinking

¶ … Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2015), binge drinking is the most common form of \"excessive alcohol use\" in the United States. Although it is difficult to quantify, binge drinking generally entails raising the blood alcohol concentration to .08 or more within a two-hour period (CDC, 2015). Typically, this entails four or more drinks on one two-hour occasion for women, or five or more on one two-hour occasion for men (Kanny, Kiu, Brewer & Lu, 2011). Binge drinking is especially problematic as an alcohol use behavior for a number of reasons, and can be especially problematic for young people. There are both short-term and long-term risks unique to binge drinking. Binge drinking alone accounts for tens of thousands of alcohol-related fatalities each year, and is linked to risky sexual behaviors, violent behavior, successful attempts at suicide, and a host of health problems from hypertension to neurological disease and liver damage (Kanny, Liu, Brewer & Lu, 2011). Binge drinking presents several short-term and long-term health and safety effects that go beyond regular alcohol consumption in young people. Research on adolescent brain development shows, for example, and binge drinking in teens is \"linked to smaller cerebellar volumes even in healthy teens,\" and that the effect increased with increased consumption (Lisdahl, et al., 2013, p. 17). Therefore, a review of literature does show that binge drinking is a major public health issue that deserves to be treated differently from regular alcohol consumption. Public health campaigns should take these differential effects into account, and focus on binge drinking in particular.

Focusing on an adolescent community is important from a public health perspective because of the especially serious consequences of binge drinking on the person\'s developmental health. Research on public health campaigns is revealing some of the best practices that can be employed by communications experts in order to help reduce the prevalence of binge drinking, with the ultimate goal of reducing the harms associated with binge drinking. For example, one study examined three different types of advertising campaigns, each focused on different aspects of student drinking behaviors (Dejong, 2002). Those key types included social norms related to drinking, information related to binge drinking and specific harms, and a focus on advocacy. The results showed that of these three types, the one that is least used is advocacy, and the researchers suggest that advocacy-themed anti-binge drinking public health campaigns might be helpful additions to the mix of advertising already being used. Dejong (2002) also showed that a survey of anti-binge drinking campaigns showed that the most common form of campaign was information-driven and yet there is no empirical evidence to suggest that information-driven campaigns actually work to reduce binge drinking behaviors. The Dejong (2002) research also shows that it is may in fact be more effective to tell adolescents to say no to binge drinking, based on the assumption that adolescents can learn how to drink responsibly if given the opportunity to learn how.

The core components of a public relations campaign include planning, setting strategic objectives, focusing on specific target audiences, staging an appropriate response, defining key promises, avoiding irrational appeals like fear or guilt appeals, and selecting the right mix of media channels (Dejong, 2002). In addition to these elements, media exposure needs to be maximized, prior to conducting process and outcomes evaluations to determine whether the anti-bing drinking campaign is actually working. Dejong (2002) concludes that the best approach to a public health campaign seeking to minimize binge drinking among adolescent audiences would integrate information, social norms marketing, and advocacy approaches. This combined approach would be multifaceted and would help \"create a climate of support for institutional, community and policy changes that will alter the environment in which students make decisions about their alcohol consumption,\" (Dejong, 2002, p. 182). When given the opportunity to seek advocacy options, and learn how to drink responsibly, adolescents may avoid unsafe binge drinking behaviors, and even reduce overall alcohol consumption. Specific high schools that would be selected for a targeted public awareness campaign against binge drinking would include high schools that have large student populations and also high rates of binge drinking, in order to have a larger population sample that could yield more measurable and meaningful outcomes. As the CDC (2015) shows that binge drinking is more common among wealthier demographics, it may also be responsible to focus the interventions on at-risk youth.