Using the Solid Research Base on Pregaming to Begin Intervention Development
An Epilogue to the Special Issue on Pregaming
Published in: Substance Use & Misuse, v. 51, no. 8, July 2016, p. 1067-1073
Posted on RAND.org on June 30, 2016
Read More
Access further information on this document at Substance Use & MisuseThis article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
The pregaming research to date, up to and including the innovative studies included in this special issue, has centered on defining the behavior, learning which students may be most at-risk for pregaming, exploring which contexts may be most risky for pregaming, and quantifying the function of pregaming so that individual-level programs can be developed to target the risky practice. Although there is room for continuing to expand and refine our understanding of pregaming, much of the formative work has been conducted—primarily by the researchers highlighted in this special issue. Now it is time to use the understanding we have of this risky behavior to develop and empirically test programs specifically directed toward reducing or eliminating the behavior, not just at the individual level, but by targeting the social, cultural, economic, environmental, and policy level factors that sustain the behavior in the population. This may include targeting the behavior directly through use of techniques that are shown to be effective for young adult behavior change, but this may also require broadening beyond the psychological literature and utilizing expertise from other domains to affect behavior change.
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
Our mission to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis is enabled through our core values of quality and objectivity and our unwavering commitment to the highest level of integrity and ethical behavior. To help ensure our research and analysis are rigorous, objective, and nonpartisan, we subject our research publications to a robust and exacting quality-assurance process; avoid both the appearance and reality of financial and other conflicts of interest through staff training, project screening, and a policy of mandatory disclosure; and pursue transparency in our research engagements through our commitment to the open publication of our research findings and recommendations, disclosure of the source of funding of published research, and policies to ensure intellectual independence. For more information, visit www.rand.org/about/principles.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.