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Background: Unhealthy alcohol use among university students is cause for concern, yet the level of help seeking behavior for alcohol use is low within the student population. Electronic brief interventions delivered via the Internet present an alternative to traditional treatments and could enable the delivery of interventions on a population basis. Further evidence is needed of the effectiveness of Internet-delivered interventions and of their generalizability across educational institutions.

Objective: Our objective was to evaluate the effectiveness across 4 UK universities of a Web-based intervention for student alcohol use.

Methods: In total, 1112 participants took part. Participants were stratified by educational institution, gender, age group, year of study, and self-reported weekly consumption of alcohol and randomly assigned to either the control arm or to the immediate or delayed intervention arms. Intervention participants gained access to the intervention between weeks 1 to 7 or weeks 8 to 15, respectively. The intervention provided electronic personalized feedback and social norms information on drinking behavior accessed by logging on to a website. Participants registered interest by completing a brief screening questionnaire and were then asked to complete 4 further assessments across the 24 weeks of the study. Assessments included a retrospective weekly drinking diary, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), and a readiness-to-change algorithm. The outcome variable was the number of units of alcohol consumed in the last week. The effect of treatment arm and time on units consumed last week and average units consumed …