Dr. Marcella Ogenchuk Receives President's SSHRC Grant

Dr. Ogenchuk and co-investigator Dr. Laurie Hellsten (College of Education) are working on a research project, Developing a Personalized Youth Alcohol Self-Assessment Tool, that they hope will help youth better understand alcohol consumption. “The majority of Saskatchewan high school youth report consuming alcohol, but many have misperceptions about how much they drink and how much their peers drink,” said Dr. Ogenchuk.

There is an alcohol intervention tool that has proven successful with adult use - the Personalized Assessment Feedback (PAF), but to date, there is no evidence-based intervention tool that allows youth to evaluate their own level of alcohol consumption. PAF invites people who drink to compare their own alcohol consumption to an average, thereby, creating a social comparison and for heavy drinkers, the social comparison motivates them to re-evaluate their own alcohol use.

Ogenchuk has this to say about their project. “There is ample evidence of binge and risky drinking in adolescents, yet no way for them to know if their consumption should be of concern. We hope to develop, test and evaluate a tool similar to the PAF for youth. Specifically, along with high school student input and participation, we are going to identify accurate and appropriate educational information related to youth alcohol use and in doing so, provide youth with a suitable social comparison, test the new youth PAF tool and evaluate its effectiveness with a sample of Saskatchewan youth.”

About the Grant

The President's SSHRC Research Fund is financed from an annual grant made to the President by SSHRC, in general support of research and scholarly work in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts at the University of Saskatchewan. The program supports preliminary research projects and the support is expected to aide in building research capacity and the development of a competitive application in SSHRC related fields in the future.