Article Review - Problem Drinking and the Workplace: An Individualized Approach to Prevention

In the article "Problem Drinking and the Workplace: An Individualized Approach to Prevention," found in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 2002, Volume 16, Number 3, by Britt K. Anderson and Mary E. Larimer that the authors predicted that participates from a medium size food and retail company who participate in a six month intervention program will reduce his or hers alcohol drinking compare to participants who do not participate in a non-treatment control group. Moreover, female drinkers were more likely to have reduced negative effects from their problem drinking. After conducting the research, the researcher concluded that employees of the company had a successful rate in reducing problem drinking especially in women.

Researchers recruited participate from a medium size food and retail company in the Pacific Northwest by a letter to participate in a study of employees who have a problem drinking within the workplace. Also, they requested that these employees were still active in the workplace and were not on-leave or retired from the company. Although there were five hundred twenty employees contacted, only two hundred forty-one agreed to participate. After questioning the participants, fifteen of them had to be exempt from the study due to health issues and seventy-one were non responders. Of the one hundred fifty-five participants who agreed to participate, ninety-eight were men and fifty-seven were woman from the range of nineteen to sixty-three years old. First, the employees were assigned to an intervention (fifty-one men and thirty-one women) or no-intervention (forty-seven men and twenty-six women) program. Next, they received a baseline assessment packet questionnaire through the mail for them to assess their drinking rates, attitudes, and related behaviors and mail it back to the researcher's office. Within three weeks after the researchers received the packet, the participants of the intervention group were asked to meet with a clinical interviewer for a feedback session. Six months after the packet was received, all the participants had received the same questionnaire packet to be filled out again and mailed. One of the areas of the intervention focused on alcohol related problems. This is an inventory of negative consequences of the participant frequency of drinking three months before the assessment. For example, did they have a hangover, blacked out, do something they regret, or did they feel bad. The participants had to score their response "daily or almost never," "once or twice a week," "once or a few times," or "never." Another area was the drinking rates; this was the pattern of drinks that were consumed during each day of the week three months before the assessment. The other areas that the intervention focused on were responsibilities, advice, empathy, menu of options, and self-efficiency. There were one to three sessions in which feedback and