Finally, to determine whether these changes in alcohol use behaviors reflected effects of the prevention programs rather than normative changes across time, we compared the Baseline/Fall and Week 22/Spring alcohol use variables between the SOTA and LRB participants and a group of matched controls not enrolled in any prevention program. Although there were some differences between programs in their patterns of alcohol use across time, our results from the above analyses did not indicate substantial differences in main effects between the LRB and SOTA programs and we did not expect such differences in efficacy to exist between the similar programs (except as an interaction when participants and programs were matched). Therefore we combined these two groups to compare prevention versus no prevention conditions.
