The NineZero Project

The leading cause of mental retardation in the United States is due to women drinking alcohol during their pregnancy. In order to combat that, The Arc of Riverside created The NineZero Project. NineZero represents the nine months a woman carries an unborn child, during which the woman should consume zero alcohol. The reason The Arc of Riverside implemented this intervention was to decrease the incidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), which affects many infants each year due to the large percentage of pregnant women reporting alcohol use in the U.S. NineZero was based on the idea that many women do not know that they are pregnant until after the first four to five weeks and will consume alcohol without knowing the implications, and by educating the youth at the time they most likely start to drink alcohol and become sexually active, less risky behavior may be adopted.

Due to the severe conditions of FAS and the notion that it can be 100% prevented, NineZero started FASTRAC: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Teaching Research Awareness Campaign. The target population for this campaign was high school students taking Introduction to Health Science. NineZero decided to recruit upperclassmen to become peer educators to teach the underclassmen about FASTRAC. Since the main outcome of this educational intervention was aimed to decrease incidence of FAS, it is a primary intervention. To standardize the knowledge and delivery of the program, NineZero coordinators developed a single power-point presentation along with a drafted script that coincided with each slide. Through this presentation, students are taught facts on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) such as the history of the disease and how alcohol affects an unborn baby. The reason why the makers of the FASTRAC program chose to use peer educators as a means to spreading FAS awareness is because they believe that when students teach their peers, the information is more easily received than if taught by an adult, particularly on such topics as pregnancy and alcohol consumption.

The goal of the program was to reduce Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and encourage zero alcohol use by pregnant women through educational and social marketing techniques for select target groups.

The NineZero program increased knowledge regarding FAS, and also showed that an approach with more emphasis on health education principles that have been shown to be effective in changing other substance use behaviors would have a more successful effect on attitudes, beliefs, and intentions.

The type of study that was used to evaluate this intervention was a longitudinal quasi-experimental design: randomized control trial. One hundred fourteen students were randomly assigned to an intervention or a comparison group. The intervention group was privy to the FASTRAC curriculum and the comparison group was not. In total, 89 people completed the trial. A survey was created in order to measure knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, perceived severity, and behavioral intention to use alcohol during pregnancy. This test was given to the students one week before the intervention and again two weeks later. The statistical test used to evaluate the study was a 2x2 repeated measures of ANOVA test. In testing FAS knowledge, the intervention group had a mean score in the pre-test of 6.76 and a post-test mean score of 7.66. In the comparison group, one would expect to see little change because they didn't receive the intervention. The mean score for the pre-test was 7.13, while the post-test score was 7.43. The p-value calculated is less than 0.01, which suggests a statistically significant increase in knowledge of FAS. In testing for change in attitudes toward alcohol use during pregnancy, changes in perceived severity of alcohol use during pregnancy, and changes in intention to use alcohol during pregnancy, no statistically significant results were found.