Two Brief Measures of Alcohol Use Produce Different Results: AUDIT-C and Quick Drinking Screen.

BACKGROUND: Several psychometrically sound measures of alcohol use have been developed to assess drinking. The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) and its shorter counterpart the AUDIT-C, which contains the first 3 AUDIT questions, were developed by the World Health Organization and have become the preferred brief measures for screening and evaluating problem severity. This study compared the first 3 questions on the AUDIT with another psychometrically sound brief measure of alcohol use, the Quick Drinking Screen (QDS). METHODS: Data were obtained from a randomized controlled trial of a mail-based intervention promoting self-change with 472 alcohol abusers (n = 280, no prior alcohol treatment; n = 192, prior alcohol treatment). Participants' retrospective self-reports of alcohol consumption were collected using the QDS and the 3 AUDIT-C questions and compared. Although both measures contain similar questions (2 quantity-frequency and 1 binge drinking), they differ in 2 important ways: (i) temporal interval over which data are collected, and (ii) formatting of response options (i.e., a continuous number vs. categorical). RESULTS: Intraclass correlations for drinking variables were moderate to moderately high. A repeated-measures MANOVA using treatment condition and gender as variables revealed significant differences in absolute values between the 2 drinking measures with the QDS showing greater consumption on almost all variables. Participants' numerical answers on the QDS were compared to their categorical answers to the similar alcohol use questions on the AUDIT-C. The comparison revealed that participants' answers on the AUDIT-C were associated with extreme variability compared to their QDS answers. This variability suggests the AUDIT-C would be unreliable as a quantitative measure of alcohol consumption. CONCLUSIONS: The differences between the 3 alcohol use questions on the AUDIT-C and the same questions on the QDS may reflect the imprecision of the AUDIT-C's drinking response categories. Results suggest that the QDS can be used to identify risky drinking and to provide a more informative characterization of a drinker's alcohol consumption than that provided by the AUDIT-C.

Craigslist versus print newspaper advertising for recruiting research participants for alcohol studies: Cost and participant characteristics.

INTRODUCTION: Technology has transformed our lifestyles in dramatic and significant ways, including new and less expensive options for recruiting study participants. This study examines cost and participant differences between two recruitment sources, Craigslist (CL), and print newspapers (PNs). This paper also reviewed and compared studies involving clinical trials published since 2010 that recruited participants using CL alone or in combination with other methods. METHOD: Secondary data analyses from a parent study involving a randomized controlled trial of a mail-based intervention to promote self-change with problem drinkers. RESULTS: Significant differences were found between CL and PN participants on most demographic and pretreatment drinking variables. While all participants had AUDIT scores suggestive of an alcohol problem and reported drinking at high-risk levels, CL participants had less severe drinking problem histories, were considerably younger, and had a higher socioeconomic status than PN participants. The total advertising costs for the 65 CL ads ($275) were significantly less than the 69 PN ads ($33, 311). The recruiting cost per eligible participant was vastly less expensive using CL ($1.46) compared to print newspaper ads ($116.88). CONCLUSIONS: Using CL is a viable recruitment method for soliciting participants, particularly those that are younger, for alcohol intervention studies. It is also less expensive than newspaper ads. When CL participants were recruited, they reported being slightly more confident to change their drinking than PN participants. Limitations of using CL are discussed, including that some initial ad responders gave inconsistent answers to similar questions and a few tried to enter the study more than once.

Shorter and proximal Timeline Followback windows are representative of longer posttreatment functioning.

Very little research has been conducted on what time window provides a representative picture of daily drinking. With respect to pretreatment drinking, one study that used the Timeline Followback (TLFB) with problem drinkers found that a 3-month window is generally representative of annual pretreatment drinking. The objective of the present study was to determine the shortest representative time window for reports of annual posttreatment drinking. A second objective was to determine which of two time windows, 90 days from the end of treatment or 90 days prior to the end of follow-up, was the most representative proxy for annual posttreatment drinking. TLFB reports from 467 problem drinkers who participated in a randomized controlled trial of a mail-based intervention were used in the present analysis. The results show that a 3-month posttreatment window (i.e., first 90 days after the intervention) is sufficiently representative (r = .94) of annual posttreatment drinking for problem drinkers (i.e., less severely dependent alcohol abusers). In addition, although there were no clinically significant differences in drinking behavior between the two 90-day posttreatment windows, the use of proximal windows (i.e., closer to the end of treatment) would minimize participant attrition. In addition, a 3-month versus 12-month TLFB follow-up time frame resulted in a much higher percentage of participants completing the full TLFB (89% vs. 71%). Further research is needed to determine if these findings will generalize to more severely dependent alcohol abusers.

Psychometric properties of the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT) with substance abusers in outpatient and residential treatment.

The psychometric properties of the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT), an 11-item self-report questionnaire developed to screen individuals for drug problems, are evaluated. The measure, developed in Sweden and evaluated there with individuals with severe drug problems, has not been evaluated with less severe substance abusers or with clinical populations in the United States. Participants included 35 drug abusers in an outpatient substance abuse treatment program, 79 drug abusers in a residential substance abuse treatment program, and 39 alcohol abusers from both treatment settings who did not report a drug abuse problem. The DUDIT was found to be a psychometrically sound drug abuse screening measure with high convergent validity (r=.85) when compared with the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10), and to have a Cronbach's alpha of .94. In addition, a single component accounted for 64.91% of total variance, and the DUDIT had sensitivity and specificity scores of .90 and .85, respectively, when using the optimal cut-off score of 8. Additionally, the DUDIT showed good discriminant validity as it significantly differentiated drug from alcohol abusers. These findings support the DUDIT as a reliable and valid drug abuse screening instrument that measures a unidimensional construct. Further research is warranted with additional clinical populations.