# ESTIMATING COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF ALCOHOL INTERVENTIONS FOR YOUNG ADULTS

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR · 2021 · $445,392

## Abstract

Project Summary
The prevention of excessive drinking and related negative consequences by underage drinkers and college
students is an important objective for Healthy People 2020. This resubmission application is aimed at
extending an R01 grant (R01 AA019511) in response to PA-15-295, “Screening and brief alcohol interventions
in underage and young adult populations (R01).” The previous R01 focused on methodological developments
for pooling and analyzing individual participant data (IPD) from 24 studies (N = 24,336 at baseline; 12,630
randomized) to examine the efficacy of brief motivational interventions (BMIs) for college students. Deploying
newly developed methods to combine and analyze IPD, the resulting large, pooled data set showed that BMIs
for college students may not be as powerful as prior reviews suggest, pointing to the need to better understand
why some interventions succeed while others fail. Our previous research on IPD was limited in terms of its
study-level sample size (24 studies) as well as its population representation. Moreover, recently published
traditional meta-analyses have found overall intervention effects, contradicting our findings. The proposed
research expands and enhances our earlier work by using the cutting-edge methodology with a comprehensive
set of data with the end goal of providing an authoritative summary of the alcohol intervention field for
adolescents and young adults. Beyond simply focusing on the omnibus question of “any effect,” our research is
aimed at testing which interventions are better and exploring how to individualize intervention strategies to
meet different needs of the individual for greater benefit (i.e., precision medicine). We will combine aggregated
data (e.g., means, SDs) from approximately 350 independent brief alcohol intervention trials and IPD from 49
trials. Of these, aggregated data from 303 samples and IPD from 24 studies have already been secured with
the support of two separate R01s (AA020286 to Tanner-Smith and AA019511 to Mun). We will maximize the
scale and depth of the existing clinical data via the following state-of-the-art synthesis approaches: network
meta-analysis (meta-regression) and multivariate meta-analysis, and their extensions for IPD. In a major
extension of prior work, the proposed investigation will (1) respect the natural hierarchy of the data (i.e.,
participants nested within studies); (2) simultaneously accommodate multiple interventions (networks instead
of any two pairs of interventions); (3) explain effect heterogeneity (i.e., strong to weak intervention effects) by
examining factors at the individual- and study-level, as well as cross-level; and (4) allow joint analysis of
multiple related outcomes (e.g., alcohol use and problems) by borrowing strength from one another. Our
transdisciplinary team of leading experts, many of whom led the earlier, successful research will generate new
evidence that will be “scalable” so that new trial data can straightf...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10147616
- **Project number:** 5R01AA019511-10
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR
- **Principal Investigator:** Eun-Young Mun
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $445,392
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2010-04-20 → 2024-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10147616

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10147616, ESTIMATING COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF ALCOHOL INTERVENTIONS FOR YOUNG ADULTS (5R01AA019511-10). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10147616. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*