Linda Hancock
Earlier this month Virginia Commonwealth University's Wellness Resource Center was recognized as being in the top five programs for the prevention of drug and alcohol abuse. The center has been awarded a $129,705 grant that they will receive over the next 12 months. Richmond.com spoke with Linda Hancock, director of the Wellness Resource Center, about what it is they do and how the grant will help them do it even better.
What services does the VCU Wellness Resource Center provide?
It's kind of overall services that make college students happier and more successful. That would be everything from nutrition counseling, to smoking cessation, to exercise and sleep, sexuality education and substance abuse prevention. So, kind of like whatever issues would impact a college student's health. Including spirituality, because, you know, the meaning of life is an important issue in college.
What do you feel makes VCU's program standout from others?
Our wonderfully creative students. Everything that we do we do in partnership with our students because they live in the population that we're trying to serve and help. We are also very theory and data driven. So if you look at substance abuse issues there's not a whole lot that's been proven to make a ton of difference, but one thing that does seem to be working is addressing this gap between what people think is real and what's really real.
What we tend to do is focus on problems instead of focusing on health. So a lot of the reason that we're recognized is that we're the leader in a field known as "social norms marketing" where we just collect data about our population then feed the truth back to them. Did you know VCU students are healthier than you think? Most wear their seatbelts, most drink zero to five days per month, most always or usually use a designated driver. Most kids do the right thing most of the time, but we think everybody else isn't. So we're trying to break this misconception gap and there's been data to show that if you can get people to realize that most people are healthy then they do what's in their heart anyway.
What can you and the Wellness Resource Center learn from the students?
I've known for 20 years that college students like to go out and have a good time, but they also like to get home safe and not have legal charges. So what they do is they use a lot of strategies; if you look for hidden goodness in your population you will find hidden goodness. They know how to take care of themselves and others. They pace their drinks; they decide ahead of time what they're going to do. They make reasonable decisions about different things. And of course there's the minority that don't and make it to the newspaper and really get hurt, and this grant will address that minority.
What will the grant provide for VCU?
The primary thing it will do is it will continue to supplement the social norms program that we're doing. But it will also allow us to do more data collection. We're going to do a campus community assessment in our area using something called GIS, geographic information systems mapping, where you take data like arrests, where they're occurring, what's going on, are there trouble spots in your community.
We'd like to be more environmental and policy driven. We're going to bring in a campus community coalition expert in the spring and do some novel stuff with that. The other thing we'll do is take the students who are identified with a problem, and usually there are a couple hundred every year that are caught with underage possession or something like that, and they'll get an alcohol education class, and we'll use audience response technology. So a part of it will be these audience response systems we'll use with the trouble children, the children that got in trouble, we use that with them and then we'll look at the impact. Did we increase knowledge and behavior change by using actual feedback systems and can we use this GIS mapping to look at effective areas to go.
How do you all go about gathering the statistics on the behaviors of VCU students?
We use a national survey by the American College Health Association called the "National College Health Assessment" and that tool has items applicable to all college students.
How do you think students' misperceptions about college factor into problems with drug and alcohol abuse?
Huuuuge. It's huge. I just did 10 sessions for all our incoming freshmen and I use these "clickers" audience response technology. It gives you immediate feedback. It's like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," and they're anonymous. So I can take a group of 300 freshmen and say "How many people do you think smoke daily?" and they think everybody's smoking cigarettes because smokers are always standing out front of the buildings. "How many of you are daily smokers?" It's like seven to eight percent.
The sex partner one always cracks me up. I ask them how many sex partners the typical college student has in a year, and they're thinking, two, three, five, 10. And it's always zero to one. Over 70 percent in the freshman class has zero to one sex partners. So they come to college thinking everybody's doing drugs, everybody's smoking pot, everybody's having sex, everybody's getting drunk and that they're the only people who aren't. But most of them have more interesting lives than that. They have a lot more going on. So the clickers really help so it's not me screwing with the data. It's immediate. This is the 300 people in the group with me right now.
Do you think the Richmond environment lends to these behaviors? Is it different than at other schools?
Actually, it does, and here's my little take on that, because I do travel the world with my clickers, I'm somewhat of a frustrated stand-up comedian, so I've probably been to 40 or 50 campuses in Virginia and I travel nationally and speak and I always take my clickers, so I get a good feel for what goes on on campuses. And actually, Richmond's pretty healthy, because there's such a diversity of things to do here.
You know how college students always say "oh, there's nothing else to do?" Well, you can't say that in Richmond. There's a ton of other things to do. Many of them have jobs, many of them go into the art scene, many of them have a lot of things to do. Actually, you would think that an urban area would put you at a higher risk for alcohol abuse, but I think it's a lot of times the isolated small colleges in the middle of nowhere that really there is nothing to do. Really, Richmond's a pretty healthy place for kids to be … I'm really trying to say young adults.
Do you feel that there's more need for prevention or intervention at VCU?
Both. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, "the mark of a first class intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing truths in mind at the same time." So it's true that we have a big problem.
I mean, if I've got 20 percent of my kids engaged in high-risk drinking, that's scary. But I also have the vast majority, that's not taking any risks. I have to deal with both those simultaneous truths at the same time. What we tend to do by default as a culture and a country is focus on the hurt kids and we're inadvertently growing the problem. What we need to do is simultaneously acknowledge the health in the majority of our population and get services to the significant 20 or 30 percent that really need the help.
There has been talk recently by colleges of wanting to lower the drinking age. What is your opinion on that?
There's only four countries in the world that have a 21 drinking age, and guess which one has the highest drinking and driving teen fatalities. That would be us. So obviously the 21 drinking age is not a magic answer. I'm glad that this initiative is on the table because we need to open the discussion about all the things we're not doing besides this age stipulation.
Here's my long version. I tell my college students that there's three types of truth. There's counting truth, we call that quantitative, where you look at numbers. That gives you part of the picture. That's why we use clickers. There's qualitative truth which is listening to the lived reality of a person in a situation. But there's also universal truth that transcends time and culture. Cultures admire courage not cowardice. Honesty not deceit.
And I think where the 21 drinking age screws up is that it disrespects humans. And I think that universal truth is that you must respect humans and the ability that they can handle that respect and dignity. And to take a 20 and a half year old college student who works a full-time job, does school, how am I supposed to tell him he can't have a beer?
Some of these kids are more stellar than most of the adults I know that are 40. So I think that by the 21 drinking age we've caused a very conflicted culture. We don't know what we want. I personally think that dropping it to 18 with a drinking license would at least allow us as a culture to say we know that people between 14 and 18 can't and don't handle their lives, they don't handle finances. It's reasonable to say they can't handle the decision to drink.
But once you're 20 and living away from home, managing all your finances, fighting in a war, it's harder to justify the statement that I can tell you just say no about a beer. But I think that the age thing loses a lot. I don't want to get hung up on the age debate. Go into your local ABC store or any 7-11 or convenience store and pick up an alcoholic beverage. You can't tell what's in it. We have so many things we could change. We could label beverages so that people knew that if they picked up a Mickey's big mouth malt liquor that they were getting two drinks per container in a 12 ounce. You pick up a handle of vodka, and can you figure out what's in it, or how many drinks in are in a serving? No, you have to do higher-level math.
I personally wish that every alcohol bottle in America was made like Pepto-Bismol or Nyquil where it had a unit dose dispensing system so that if people wanted to make reasonable and intelligent decision they could. Instead, what I have is 19 and 20 year olds who have never been shown how to pour an ounce and they're pouring three and four ounces. They have no clue how to drink safely because we've never taught them. We've just told them just say no and you don't need to know anything else. We don't tell people to just say no to driving and when they turn 16 give them the keys to the car and tell them to go to town. We stick them in classes. We educate them before they turn 16. We could do a better job with the drinking education in the country.
When you have time away from the Wellness Center how do you like to spend it?
Running with my dog in the woods. I love to run. It's my child abuse prevention program. I don't beat my children even when they deserve it. I am a mother of college sons which makes me a very humble person. I don't claim to have power over my children, and I think we as a culture need to make it safer for everybody's kids.
Please sign in to respond | | Register