Using Gimmicks in Health Education

My fellow Illinoisan (northern) Steve Lux, responded to a inquiry about the use of beer goggles as a learning vehicle.  Steve gave, in my opinion, a wonderfully worded concern about such activity.  I’m posting it here…I think one can go beyond the ‘beer goggle’ and review for all activity based events.

Posted on the HEDIR 2/27/09

There “may” be a way to incorporate beer goggles (fatal vision goggles – now there’s a lovely term) into an appropriate education/prevention program, but I have not seen it done in my 30+ years in college health. Like too many “gimmicks” they end up as a source of “entertainment,” not education. These “fancy scare tactics” are used also in part because it gets students to attend a program (no easy task). Every time I have observed them in use by well-meaning police or residence hall staff – things quickly degenerate to where it becomes a joke (How well can I do the behaviors at higher and higher BAC levels).

In addition, I believe that the degree of incapacitation that beer goggles portray is all too often over-stated, i.e., many drinkers will find that if and when they drink to a given BAC (.08 for example) they never seem to become as impaired as when they wear the .08 goggles (again, another instance where our “ends justify the means” approach to health education). When they realize that the beer goggles over-impaired them – do they then reject all of the information they were given as being in error?

I believe that we do our profession a disservice by continuing to do any intervention (other than pilots) where there is a lack of credible evidence of effectiveness. To paraphrase my colleague, Michael Haines, interventions based on the four P’s of precedence, preference, popularity or politics and not on good data and research should be avoided.

The fairly recent phenomenon of relying on student learning objectives to formulate campus health intervention plans is good movement toward eliminating wasteful and ineffective health promotion efforts. We still have a ways to go. I would love to be directed to any evidence that would encourage me that using beer goggles can be an effective part of reducing risky drinking – or even some demonstrated learning outcomes that were performed later than the same night of the program.