"Almost everyone misperceives how much college students actually drink. When people are asked to estimate it, they almost always way overshoot the reality," said Dr. Robert D. Foss, manager of alcohol studies at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center.

For the study, Foss and his research team recruited UNC students in 1997 to anonymously provide breath-alcohol measurements when they returned to their dorms on weekend and weekday evenings. The researchers found that on Mondays through Wednesdays, 85 percent of the students did not drink. On the weekends, two of three students had nothing to drink, while most of the rest only had a few drinks.

The study's findings were publicized to college students through freshmen orientation sessions, posters, and printed material distributed to every residence hall room on campus.

Following the student-education program, the researchers once again conducted breath-analysis surveys in 1999 and 2002.

"The bottom line was that on a number of different measures, student drinking had declined. Self-reported drinking was down, self-reported heavy drinking, which some people call 'binging,' was down, and, most importantly, measured breath-alcohol concentration were down," Foss said.

He added, "By 2002, the proportion of students with any alcohol had declined by 15 percent, and the proportion with a breath-alcohol concentration greater than 0.05 percent was down 23 percent."

The researchers found that 51 percent of first-year students and 45 percent of all respondents believed the campaign accurately represented drinking at UNC.

Foss said the study's findings indicate that the social-norms program was "successful in reaching its target audience."

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