Reducing Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancies Through the Use of Community-Level Guided Self-Change Programs
Community resources for assisting individuals who are problem drinkers but who are not alcohol-dependent are limited in most communities. Over the past decade, increasing attention has been directed toward programs focused on engaging the individual’s own capacity for self-change as a means of achieving recovery from alcohol problems. This approach is supported by findings that up to 75% of individuals who change their problem drinking habits do so without the use of formal treatment programs. Guided self-change (GSC) programs tend to be of low intensity as compared with traditional treatments, targeted toward the community at large, and focused on problem drinkers as opposed to severely alcohol-dependent drinkers. The goal of these programs is to attract and assist motivated individuals in the early stages of alcohol abuse to take part in an intervention aimed at facilitating a client-driven, self-change process of alcohol reduction or abstinence. GSC intervention components are similar to those of brief interventions and include personal feedback, advice, goal-setting, and self-monitoring of behavior reformatted into self-administered materials that can be completed at home.
In 2004, CDC funded two universities to 1) develop, implement, and evaluate community-level, self-guided change projects targeting women 18 to 44 years of age who are at risk for an alcohol-exposed pregnancy; and 2) demonstrate a 15% reduction in the proportion of women at risk for an alcohol-exposed pregnancy in community-based intervention sites as compared with non-intervention community-based sites.
Funded Projects:
Nova Southeastern University—Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
An intervention will be instituted for a sample of women 18 to 44 years of age who are at risk for an alcohol-exposed pregnancy in three counties in south Florida. Participants will be recruited through the media...