Feasibility of an email-based electronic screening and brief intervention (e-SBI) to college students in Sweden

Abstract

An email-based electronic screening and brief intervention (e-SBI) with personalized normative feedback on alcohol habits was offered to all 3,875 second term students at Linköping University, Sweden. The students received an email with a link to a computerized alcohol habit test and were offered personalized feedback directly on the computer screen. The students evaluated the test and were asked to state whether they were going to consider changing or actually change their alcohol habits. The response rate was 44%, with 742 female and 843 male students participating. The students displayed a strong gender difference in drinking pattern. A three-fold higher percentage of males than females were risky drinkers with regard to a high average weekly volume consumption. The gender differences were less pronounced regarding heavy episodic drinking that was reported by 51% of the females and 70.5% of the males. The email-based computerized normative feedback was appreciated by the students and one-third of the females and one-fifth of the males believed that they would benefit from the normative feedback; 8% of the females and 3% of the males believed that they would actually change their habits after the feedback. Students with a risky drinking pattern, previous experiences of blackouts, being dissatisfied with their current drinking and students that had considered to change their habits before the e-SBI, yielded a stronger motivation to change their drinking after having performed the intervention compared to students without such characteristics. The e-SBI with normative feedback was simple to administer and has the potential to be used repeatedly and on a large scale with minimum effort in terms of cost and time.