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BASICS Program
What is BASICS?
BASICS stands for Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students. The goal of the program is to reduce risky behaviors and harmful consequences of alcohol abuse. The program is designed to assist students in examining their own behavior in a judgment-free environment.
BASICS IS NOT a "Just Say No" or abstinence-only program. The program coordinator will provide objective feedback, based on questionnaires filled out by the student, in order to encourage positive changes in drinking behavior. Essentially, BASICS will provide the information and guidance, but what a student chooses to do with it is entirely up to him/her. The BASICS sessions are entirely confidential, and we will not disclose any information from the sessions to anyone, including a student's parents, without the student's permission.
BASICS is administered by trained graduate students who have clinical experience and are working under the supervision of a licensed psychologist. The BASICS program consists of a two hour group workshop and a 45-60 minute individual follow-up session.
The group workshop covers topics such as the size of standard drinks, BAC content, factors that influence BAC, tolerance, alcohol poisoning, associated risky behaviors, and legal consequences. At the end of the group session, students fill out questionnaires on alcohol use that are then used to provide personalized feedback in the follow-up session. The information in these surveys is kept strictly confidential.The individual follow-up session is designed to give feedback to each student and help him or her to assess personal drinking habits and identify any areas for potential change.
The BASICS program charges $50 to all students who are referred for alcohol or marijuana violations. The program is free for students who voluntarily attend in order to educate themselves.
Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS) is an empirically-validated, well established drinking intervention designed for use in college samples. The goal of BASICS is to reduce risky behaviors and harmful consequences of drinking. This distinguishes it from traditional alcohol-use interventions that focus on achieving specific drinking goals like abstinence. Program participants are assumed to have drunk heavily at some point and to have experienced some alcohol-related problems. It is not assumed, however, that the students have a definite drinking problem or alcohol abuse diagnosis. The program treats drinking behaviors as though they are on a continuum such that most college students do not need a more intensive intervention.
The components of BASICS target students' misinformation or lack of information, poor coping skills, developmental stage, and personal or environment risk characteristics such as beliefs about alcohol and peer group norms. During the group workshop, counselors conduct a psycho-educational discussion of the positive and negative effects of alcohol use and emphasize the risks associated with higher levels of drinking. Students then fill out questionnaires on their personal drinking patterns.
The follow-up interview consists of personalized feedback based on the questionnaires. It focuses on ways the student can reduce future health risks associated with his or her drinking by offering specific coping strategies to reduce these alcohol-related risks. A second goal is to increase the student's motivation to change risky behaviors by using motivational interviewing techniques. Motivational interviewing techniques are based on the transtheoretical model of change. This model provides a framework for understanding behavior rather than providing a theory of behavior. The model posits that the behavioral change process is a continuum starting at not perceiving a need for change to taking specific actions to effect desired changes. A therapist can use motivational interviewing techniques to move a client along the stages of change. A therapist working from this perspective will focus on expressing empathy, developing a discrepancy between current behavior and broader goals, avoiding arguments and use of labels, supporting self-efficacy and using resistance as a problem-solving exercise (Miller & Rollnick, 1991).
The BASICS program has been found to be effective for changing drinking and related behaviors in college undergraduates (Marlatt, Baer, Kivlahan, Dimeff, Larimer, Quigley, et al., 1998; Baer, Kivlahan, Blume, McKnight, & Marlatt, 2001). More specifically, BASICS led to significant reductions in drinking as well as reductions in alcohol-related problems like not being able to remember what happened while drinking or missing a day of school or work that extended out as far as 4 years following completion of the program. When Roberts and colleagues (Roberts, Neal, Kivlahan, Baer & Marlatt, 2000) explored the clinical significance of the treatment, they found a high percentage of high-risk drinkers who received the intervention fell into the low-risk group during the follow-up period.
Much of the validation of the BASICS program has taken place at the University of Washington, but researchers at other universities have found comparable success with the program. Borsari and Carey (2000) used the BASICS program with high-risk drinkers recruited from an introductory psychology class at Syracuse University. The group receiving the brief intervention drank in less quantity, less frequently and had fewer binge episodes at the 6-week follow-up than the group that did not get any treatment. These differences were clinically significant; the average person in the treatment group drank less on these measures than about 60% of the control group members. A group of researchers at Brown University also reported success using the treatment with older adolescents sent to a hospital emergency room after an alcohol-related medical event. They found adolescents who participated in the intervention were four times less likely to drink and drive and significantly less likely to have a moving violation, sustain an alcohol-related injury and report alcohol-related problems than either the standard care (physician consultation and fact sheets) or no treatment groups at the 6-month follow-up (Monti, Colby, Barnett, Spirito, Rohsenow et al. 1999). Finally, evidence suggests men and women respond equally well to the intervention (Baer et al., 2001; Borsari & Carey, 2000).
In sum, a survey of validated, psychoeducationally-based interventions for binge drinking clearly suggests that the BASICS program is highly effective for college populations
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