EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report summarizes the results of a highway safety impact evaluation of four underage drinking prevention programs in the United States. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), through the National Association of Governor’s Highway Safety Representatives
(now called the Governors Highway Safety Association [GHSA]) and with the cooperation of several Governor’s Highway Safety Programs (GHSPs), funded five underage drinking prevention programs around the country1 with the ultimate objective of reducing youth alcohol-related crashes. This effort was implemented as a pilot test of whether the perceived success of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program (WRAP) youth activities could be replicated in other jurisdictions and to provide objective evidence of their effectiveness.

The four programs that are evaluated here began in the mid-1990s. This report briefly describes them and estimates their impact on surrogates of alcohol-related crashes. The programs and their locations were:

  • Safe and Sober Youth (SASY) - Chesterfield County, Virginia
  • Project Extra Mile (PEM) - Omaha, Nebraska
  • Salt Lake City Underage Drinking Prevention Project (SLCUDPP) -
    Salt Lake County, Utah
  • Travis County Underage Drinking Prevention Program (TCUDPP) - Travis County, Texas

Three of the programs (SASY, PEM, and TCUDPP) emphasized public in-formation and education (PI&E) strategies, with the PEM program also including an active legislative component. Areas of major emphasis for these three programs were:

SASY - Chesterfield County, Virginia

  • Raising public awareness of the dangers of underage drinking through prevention and education efforts;
  • Providing an opportunity for increased communication and collaboration on underage drinking initiatives;
  • Reducing underage youth access to alcohol; and
  • Developing and enhancing judicial alternative sentencing.

PEM - Omaha, Nebraska

  • Increasing awareness of youth drinking and driving issues and youth alcohol laws by the general public;
  • Increasing enforcement of youth alcohol laws;
  • Educating the medical community treating the under 21 group on the issue of underage drinking and drinking-driving.
  • Providing school staff, students, and school-related groups with current information on youth alcohol issues, including drinking and driving and youth alcohol laws; and
  • Maintaining an established, informed community coalition and providing information to the community regarding the coalition’s mission and activities.

TCUDPP - Travis County, Texas

  • Identifying the link between underage drinking with more highly visible social issues such as truancy, binge drinking, teen pregnancy, HIV exposure, and gangs/juvenile crime;
  • Developing education programs for high risk youth groups as well as in all Travis County high schools and middle schools; and
  • Increasing community prevention and education efforts through media resources.

None of these three programs was found to have an impact on surrogates of alcohol-related crashes involving underage drivers. However, it is possible that the available data were not sufficient for detecting such an impact in some of the jurisdictions studied, especially in light of the small number of youth-involved traffic crashes that occurred in some jurisdictions. Also, it is possible that other positive effects not reflected in alcohol-related crashes may have occurred (for example, better coordination between community partners, increased awareness of the youth drinking problem, or reductions in youth drinking). The measurement of such effects goes beyond analyses of archival crash data, for example, relying on surveys of self-reported drinking practices and, sometimes, involving the analyses of other data such as that contained in special studies of crash victims admitted to hospital trauma centers.

The fourth program (SLCUDPP - Salt Lake County, Utah) emphasized enforcement of laws prohibiting sales of alcoholic beverages to underage youth, supported by youth peer programs. Other areas addressed by this program were:

  • Developing better data collection systems;
  • Increasing public awareness of the issue of underage drinking; and
  • Encouraging public policy changes.

This program had a possible impact that increased with time starting about a year after program initiation. The number of nighttime crashes involving an underage driver gradually decreased in the program’s jurisdiction (Salt Lake County, Utah), with the decrease amounting to about 20 crashes per month (about 14%) at three years after program initiation (p=0.10).

These findings suggest that, to have an alcohol-crash impact on the target group in the short-range future, PI&E alone is insufficient and that initiatives aimed at reducing the availability of alcoholic beverages, and/or at deterring driving after drinking, may be necessary. Similar findings with respect to drinking-drivers in general have been reported elsewhere (Jones and Lacey, 2001; Wagenaar, Murray, and Toomey, 2000).

1The fifth program was no longer in existence at the time of the evaluation.