SafeTREC Seminar May 1, 2015: Preventive Interventions Aimed at Reducing Alcohol Related Traffic Injuries and Deaths

Despite many decades of prevention efforts, alcohol related traffic injuries and deaths due to drinking and drunken driving remain major problems in communities throughout the US. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has recently sponsored an extensive study of the etiology of these problems across mid-size cities in California and is currently supporting an evaluation of community-based environmental preventive interventions intended to reduce these problems in 24 of these cities.  One of the primary concerns of these studies has been to identify the ecological causes and correlates of drinking and drunken driving in order to better tailor prevention efforts.  If we can identify the primary sources of drinking drivers in community settings, we can tailor prevention efforts to drinkers in those settings and develop effective behavioral ecological interventions.  The challenges are to develop a comprehensive representation of sources of drinking and drunken driving in community settings, and then use that information to guide prevention efforts. Progress on these efforts will be discussed.  

Dr. Paul J. Gruenewald has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Prevention Research Center (PRC), Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), since 1987. His research interests focus upon studies of the social, economic and physical availability of alcohol, alcohol use and alcohol-related problems, evaluation methodologies appropriate to community-based preventive interventions, and geospatial analysis.  Dr. Gruenewald is the Scientific Director of PRC, a research division of PIRE that focuses upon the development of sound scientific bases for the prevention of alcohol and drug problems. He also directs the Spatial Systems Group, a coordinating center for PIRE-wide work using Geographic Information Systems, Spatial Statistical Systems, and Spatial Dynamic Models.  He has been a Principal or Co-Investigator on 24 funded research projects.