College is a place where many
students tend to forget about their education and start to experiment being on
their own for the first time. Drugs and alcohol are prevalent among these
students. According to ACHA (2012) about 79% of the students had used marijuana
in the last month, and only 10% of students had never used. In the past few
years a few web based programs have popped up recently. One of these programs
is called The Marijuana eCHECKUP TO GO, or
e-TOKE for short. With the program being so new, a study just came out with
some preliminary evaluations of the program. This study took a baseline and
then a one-month evaluation. This was
set up as a randomized controlled study with four different categories. The
participants where broken first into two categories of using the program or not
using e-TOKE. They were further broken in half of each group as to taking a
full survey at the end and a brief short survey at the end. There were a total of 317 participants with
52% being females and 78% claiming to be white. All of the participants were
randomly assigned to the different groups. Their gender was given into
consideration however, in order to make it the same across the groups. Each “… participant reported the number of
days they used marijuana in the past month. Then, they reported
marijuana-related problems in the past month using the 18-item Rutgers
Marijuana Problems Inventory” (Elliott, Vanable & Carey, 2014, p. 289). The
researchers found the students liked the online on your own format, but a majority
of them would not recommend the program to a friend. They also found the men in
the e-TOKE group actually abused the drug more after the program than did those
in the control groups. However, females were the exact opposite of the men in
this study. The researchers did find that descriptive norms were changed by
those in the e-TOKE program. One of the draw backs to this study is how short
it was. If the participants were to continue taking surveys they might have
seen a change in the abuse of the drug. A few of the limitations to this study
included environmental control, the population tested, using a self-report
measure, and how a few participants forgot they even completed the
program. Overall, e-TOKE was a great
tool to help change some misconceptions the students had.
Elliott, J. C., Carey, K. B., & Vanable, P. A. (2014). A preliminary
evaluation of a web-based intervention for college marijuana use. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 28(1), 288-293. doi:10.1037/a0034995
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