Essay: Alcohol Behavior Among Adolescents - Impact Evaluation And Strategies.

Discuss About The Changes Alcohol Behavior Among Adolescents?

This evaluation plan discusses the impact evaluation for Alcohol culture Change program, an VicHealth’s program dedicated to change or project a proper drinking culture among the youth. This promotional program focuses on normal drinking values and culture and it aims to decrease the array of acceptance of drunkenness among youth. This project is a joint venture of the Vichealth and the state government of Victoria (Vichealth.vic.gov.au 2017).

Drinking culture is known as the practices or customs one civilization has acquired with time. There are different attitudes regarding drinking alcohols or alcoholic beverages around the world and those attitudes varies as well. Australians use alcohol widely to celebrate happiness events and according to government reports they spend around $14.1 billion on alcohol yearly (abs.gov.au 2017). The major influences behind alcohol consumption are peer pressure, family, social occasion or to express the social status and marketing. However, this open acceptance of alcohol damages the society as well. Excessive alcohol consumption carries some negative effects on the society that includes drunken driving accidents, increasing crimes in which youth is accused, domestic as well as public violence, health degradation of alcohol addicts, damaged social connection and so on. According to (abs.gov.au 2017), alcohol overdose is the reason of every one in eight deaths of under 25 aged people in Australia.

To change this scenario, VicHealth announced alcohol culture change program supported by the state government ofVictoria. The purpose of this program is to protect those who get affected due to the alcohol culture. The norms about alcohol consumption is vague in Australia, hence, it is important to account the social, environmental and economic factors of alcohol in those subpopulation as well. The framework of this program targets to change the habits of alcohol consumption (Kubacki et al. 2015). Prime strategy of this program to change the alcohol culture is by arranging alcohol free events. Major events like race days, school/college partiesand festivals can be arranged without serving alcohol. Other key strategies include:

• Educate the society about alcohol consumption with pros and cons. this will help to provide a targeted and improved idea of its misuse. Furthermore, it will help to tackle crime and other anti-social activities by educating the youth about alcohol’s adverse effects (Riekert, Ockene and Pbert 2013).
• Convincing the alcohol industries to take part in the culture change initiative so that their customers can understand the alcohol related harms and take active part to change such culture (De Bono, Heling and Borg 2014).

According to a Meng et al. (2014), the strategy used to influence change in the drinking culture of England was educating society about overuse of alcohol. This education was provided in schools and colleges to influence the younger generation to take part in this promotional drive. Even the workplace, market and other public place was equipped with advertisements and pamphlets to educate the citizens about the limits, and overdose effects of alcohol. The alcohol companies were advised to sell their product with a message to encourage sensible drinking.

Past research evidences (Literature review)

According to Smith (2015), New Zealand government used a set of strategies to overcome the drinking culture harms. These strategies involved social campaigns, change in driving norms and criminal laws, social media pages to force the people change the habit of getting drunk. The government also considered taxation reforms regarding alcohol consumption and carried out promotional campaigns in every public place to let people understand the adverse effects of alcohol overdose in society.

The prime aim of this assignment is to carry out the evaluation of the impact of alcohol culture change in Australia. The objective of this evaluation is to understand:

• What was the reaction of people who use alcohol to socialite?
• What was the prime changes in the society?
• What was the rate of crimes or accidents after implementation of this program?
• What was the benefits or adverse effects of this program on the health of alcohol consumers?

• The VicHealth organization and the State government of Victoria are spending a huge sum of amount to conduct this program. A huge section of public taxes has been used to implement the strategies. Hence, it is important to find out the reaction of public to understand role in this cultural change initiative.
• Role of community and individual is important for this change, as government cannot force people to stop drinking without changing drinking norms. Therefore, it is important to register the changes in the society.
• Increased rates of drunken drive accidents and criminal activities was one of the prime reasons this cultural change program was implemented. Hence, to understand the impact of this program it is important to record the rates of accidents and criminal activities after the commencement of alcohol culture change.
• Addiction to alcohol made maximum number of citizen reluctant about their health, leading to deteriorated health conditions. Even the adolescent age group become addicted to alcohol, indicating towards an unhealthy society. Therefore, during evaluation of the impact of this program it is important to record the hospital admissions due to alcohol overdose after implementation of the strategies mentioned.

The prime goal of this impact evaluation is to understand the intended or unintended effects due to the changes in alcohol culture in Australian society.

The chosen evaluation design for assessment will be Quasi Experimental Design (QED). In this type of experimental design, user can study the effects or impacts of the applied intervention on the target population. The prime difference between the randomized control trial and QED is the later does not have random assignment to trials or controls. Hence, it let the user to study the effect on the entire population for a stretch of time. In a similar experimental design, Verho et al. (2012) had used QED to evaluate the impact of alcohol Addiction on younger generation. The participants of this program were interviewed thrice during the intervention process. First interview took place at the beginning of the program, which was denoted as T0 of the impact evaluation. The interview lasted for 90 minutes. Second interview took place after 6 months during the intervention and lasted for 45 minutes. Third interview was carried out after the completion of the intervention and all the data were recorded and analyzed based on Addiction Survey Index (ASI), social interaction, psychological tests and so on. In another experimental design used byArsenaeault et al. (2015), surveys as well as personal interviews were used as tools to estimate the total impact of drug prohibition program on the youth of UK.

The advantages or strengths of the QED over other evaluation programs are the prime reason behind selection of this experimental design. The advantages are as follows:

• This process reduces the difficulties and moralconcerns,which surrounds the random selection of the test subject. Instead, it includes all the participants in surveys or interviews (Cook 2015).
• It reduces the time required to carry out random assignment and pre-screening, hence it is feasible to use the design for health programs that includes thousands of people (Campbell and Stanley 2015).
• It is easy to identify the trends through the implemented surveys and interviews instead of other time consuming experimental designs (Furtak et al. 2012).

• During the examination of impact of alcohol culture change program on the people addicted to it, different factors need to be taken into account. These are education, social influence, effects on health and so on. These pre-existing factors are not taken into account in the case of quasi-experimental design (Kontopantelis et al. 2015).
• Human error is one of the prime disadvantages of this approach. People generally avoid the idea of surveys and interviews as according to them it is time consuming and cannot change the view of others (Larsson et al. 2014).
• Surveys has their own limitation as answers of questions can be contradictory and users can interpret different questions differently. Data errors are other disadvantage of surveys in QED as non-responded questions may create biasness (Moser and Kalton 2017).

As per the QED norms, the data need to be collected thrice, before commencement of the process, in between the process, and after completion of the process (Corcoran 2013). According to the VicHealth alcohol Culture change program, the place where the evaluation will take place is Victoria. Five groups containing 10 people will be send to every promotional camps and public /private places where awareness of this program has need carried out. The role of the team will be conducting surveys and interviews in those areas to understand the trends and local mindset. Data collection will be done from those people who are willing to change their habits of alcohol consumption after the awareness programs. Each promotional campaign is proposed to enroll 25 individuals to take part in the program. The data will be collected from promotional camps, official websites, social networking sites and organizations office. All the partner institutions will also carry out the same process as per their convenience.

Evaluation Strategy

The first survey and interview will be carried out before commencement of the program. Participants will be asked a set of questions which will include:

• Why they want to change their habit of consuming excess amount of alcohol?
• What made them think that consuming excess amount of alcohol will affect their health adversely?
• Why do they think that alcohol culture change will be beneficial for society?
• Why do they believe alcohol culture change will reduce the amount of crimes and accidents happening in society?

Another round of data collection will be carried out after 6 months of the commencement of the program. This session will also have surveys and interviews of the participants. However, the set of questions will be different from the previous one. The questions will be:

• What are the feelings of participants after reducing the amount of alcohol?
• Are they able to withstand the aftereffects of alcohol addiction?
• Are they able to spot the changes in their behavior and in society as well?

Third round of interview and survey will be carried out after the completion of the program. They will be asked a set of questions including:

• How the alcohol culture change program changed their personality?
• How they will be able to change the alcohol culture in the society in future?
• What are their feedback about the culture change program carried out by VicHealth organization?

Budget is an importnt factor to carry out such a huge health promotional program. The following table describes the budget and from where they will be collected.

Conclusion

In spite of living in a post-modern world, Addiction has been evolved as the biggest enemy of the humankind. The broad acceptance of alcohol consumption has forced and influenced people to consume excess amount of alcohol that leads people to commit crimes. The VicHealth’s program to change the alcohol culture was proposed to change this acceptance in the society which destroys the society itself. This assignment points out the strategies of the program. The prime aim of this assignment was to carry out the impact evaluation of the program by different approaches. QED was carried out to evaluate the impact. The timeline strategies and budget factors were also included.

References

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Campbell, D.T. and Stanley, J.C., 2015. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Ravenio Books.

Cook, T.D., 2015. Quasi?experimental design. Wiley Encyclopedia of Management.

Corcoran, N. ed., 2013. Communicating health: strategies for health promotion. Sage.

De Bono, S., Heling, G. and Borg, M.A., 2014. Organizational culture and its implications for infection prevention and control in healthcare institutions. Journal of Hospital Infection, 86(1), pp.1-6.

Furtak, E.M., Seidel, T., Iverson, H. and Briggs, D.C., 2012. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies of inquiry-based science teaching: A meta-analysis. Review of educational research, 82(3), pp.300-329.

Kontopantelis, E., Doran, T., Springate, D.A., Buchan, I. and Reeves, D., 2015. Regression based quasi-experimental approach when randomisation is not an option: interrupted time series analysis. bmj, 350, p.h2750.

Kubacki, K., Rundle-Thiele, S., Pang, B. and Buyucek, N., 2015. Minimizing alcohol harm: A systematic social marketing review (2000–2014). Journal of Business Research, 68(10), pp.2214-2222.

Larsson, H., Sariaslan, A., Långström, N., D'onofrio, B. and Lichtenstein, P., 2014. Family income in early childhood and subsequent attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a quasi?experimental study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 55(5), pp.428-435.

Meng, Y., Holmes, J., Hill?McManus, D., Brennan, A. and Meier, P.S., 2014. Trend analysis and modelling of gender?specific age, period and birth cohort effects on alcohol abstention and consumption level for drinkers in Great Britain using the General Lifestyle Survey 1984–2009. Addiction, 109(2), pp.206-215.

Moser, C.A. and Kalton, G., 2017. Survey methods in social investigation. Routledge.

Riekert, K.A., Ockene, J.K. and Pbert, L. eds., 2013. The handbook of health behavior change. Springer Publishing Company.

Smith, L.A., 2015. ‘Oh they drink here harder I think’: young people and alcohol consumption at three New Zealand secondary school formals. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(1), pp.118-132.

Verho, A., Laatikainen, T., Vartiainen, E., &Puska, P. 2012. Changes in Alcohol Behaviour among Adolescents in North-West Russia between 1995 and 2004. Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 2012, 736249.

Vichealth.vic.gov.au (2017). Alcohol Culture Change Initiative 2016–2019. [online] Vichealth.vic.gov.au. Available at: https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/programs-and-projects/alcohol-culture-change-initiative [Accessed 21 Sep. 2017].