Prevention Basics

Many of the elements essential to developing and implementing effective campus alcohol and other drug abuse and violence (AODV) prevention efforts are the processes by which one creates cultural—or “environmental”—change on a college campus. These processes are germane to much of the work in prevention and public health: building partnerships and coalitions, undertaking a strategic planning process that is informed by prevention science, and taking into account what others in the field are doing to address similar problems.

Elements of Environmental Management

In supporting healthy and safe campus environments and reducing substance and violence abuse among college students, the Higher Education Center promotes a comprehensive approach termed environmental management. This approach is grounded in the social ecological model of public health, which acknowledges and attempts to address a broad array of factors that influence individual health decisions and behaviors on the institutional, community, and public policy levels, in addition to those at the individual and group levels.

Motivations for engaging in high-risk behaviors vary from one person to the next, as do the motivations for changing or curbing those behaviors. Environmental management seeks to bring about behavior change through multiple channels, both promoting positive behaviors and norms and also discouraging high-risk behaviors. It encompasses a range of activities from environmental change that includes policy changes at the campus and community levels to early intervention programs aimed at students to awareness activities aimed at groups known to be at higher risk for engaging in problem behaviors, and finally, to health protection programs that aim to minimize the harm incurred through problem behaviors.

While environmental management encompasses a spectrum of programs and interventions from primary prevention to early intervention and treatment, it stresses the prevention of high-risk behavior through changes to the environment in which students make decisions about violence and their alcohol and other drug use.