Beer pong. Quarters. Flip cup. The drinking games college students play can seem like an alcohol-laced version of intramural sports.
When college-aged drinkers imbibe too heavily, the risk for physically harming a romantic partner rises considerably.
What if there was a way for heavy drinkers to monitor their alcoholic intake and blood-alcohol levels in real time, before an intimate situation cascades into physical violence?
Or, as Virginia Tech researcher and assistant professor of psychology Meagan Brem put it: “If we can identify a cut-off where students’ risk for perpetration [of violence] would be highest, we might be able to perform just-in-time delivery of interventions to prevent perpetration.”
Brem, director of the university’s Research for Alcohol and Couples Health Lab and an Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment Scholar, leads a team of Virginia Tech researchers in the development of a study where self-identified heavy drinkers use pocket-sized electronic devices to monitor their drinking habits, alcohol levels, mood, and behavior. The study, initially supported by seed funding from the institute, has recently secured a $434,491 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, commonly called an R21 grant, as part of a National Institutes of Health program to support research projects in the nascent stages of development.