Weekend Text Messages Increase Protective Behavioral Strategies and Reduce Harm Among College Drinkers Steven M. Edwards 1 & Antover P. Tuliao 2 & Joseph L. D. Kennedy 1 & Dennis E. McChargue 1 Received: 24 February 2020 /Revised: 20 May 2020 /Accepted: 8 July 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Abstract The current study examined whether a brief text messaging intervention compared to an assessment only/no treatment control would differentially increase protective behavioral strategies (PBS) that were associated with reducing negative alcohol-related negative consequences during football game weekends. Eligible participants (n = 161) were college students who had at least one drinking occasion in the past 30 days. Participants completed a baseline assessment prior to the experimental weekend before being randomly assigned to receive either a text-message condition that instructed students to use PBS or an assessment only/no treatment condition. Participants in the text messaging condition received a message on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of a game weekend. Follow-up assessments were completed within 3 days following the experimental weekend. After controlling for amount of use, results suggest that for game day, those in the text-messaging condition reported significantly higher utilization of PBS and significantly lower negative alcohol-related consequences as compared with the assessment only/no treatment condition. Overall, the results highlight the importance of text messaging as an alternative intervention method that minimizes harm associated with drinking during football game weekends. Keywords Alcohol . Protective behavioral strategies . Text-messaging Introduction Alcohol consumption is a daily occurrence on college cam- puses across the USA, with nearly 55% of college students reporting consuming alcohol within the past month and more than 1 out of 3 engaging in binge drinking (defined as 5 or more drinks on the same occasion for males and 4 or more drinks on the same occasion for females; U.S. DHHS, 2018). Because alcohol use is common and frequent in the college population, it is often associated with myriad negative conse- quences. These consequences include the following: develop- ment of an alcohol use disorder (AUD), academic difficulty, accidental injury, sexual assault, a variety of diseases, including heart disease and various cancers, and overdose- related death (Blanco et al. 2008; Hingson et al. 2005; Hingson et al. 2009; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality 2018) that can severely impact the individual, their family and friends, and the college community in general. In response to the frequent and often harmful use of alco- hol, there has been a collective effort to develop interventions to address these issues. One of the most common types of interventions used in college populations are screening and brief interventions (SBIs). SBIs typically include a component intended to screen individuals for moderate-severe alcohol use and then work to utilize a brief interventional component to reduce the frequency and amount of alcohol consumption, while sometimes including a component directed at reducing the harm associated with consumption. Meta-analytic data of Screening and Brief Interventions (SBI) that collectively tar- get such risk shows reduction in alcohol consumption (d= 0.11–.40) but does not consistently demonstrate a reduc- tion in harm (Larimer and Cronce 2002; Larimer and Cronce 2007). The notable discrepancy between use and harm may, in part, result because alcohol-related harm is not always expe- rienced by heavy drinkers and avoided by light drinkers (Ray Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00149-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dennis E. McChargue Dmcchargue2@unl.edu 1 Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 238 Burnett Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0308, USA 2 Department of Community, Family, and Addiction Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00149-4