Effectively Limiting Alcohol Use by Self-Choice

This study involved 256 individual and they were in the age group of 19-75. The study was done in the UK where the legal drinking age is 18 years old. These individuals where divided, one group had to come up with way to help themselves resist alcohol by self-implementing procedures. The other group was given a volitional help sheet which had a column of temptations and a column with correct responses to those temptations, some with multiple intentions and another group with single intentions. The last group was an Active control. They were to record their amount of alcohol intake over the three months. 

After the three months it was discovered that with the volitional help sheet (both multiple and single intentions) was most successful in reducing alcohol in the participants. The self-implementing procedure participant’s alcohol levels slightly increased. The volitional help sheet participants with multiple intentions went from 2.33 units of alcohol to 1.93. The other volitional help sheet group with single intentions went from 3.41 to 2.02. The self-implementing procedures went from 3.30 to 3.62. The active control went from 3.96 to 3.54.

Since the level of drinking went down after the three months of recording alcohol intake in the Volitional help sheet groups it has been found successful in people’s lives. In the future these volitional help sheet would be beneficial to the population of drinkers who need to decrease their amount of alcohol intake. It is also a good way to decrease alcohol because it is cheap and efficient.

One limitation to this study is that the sample size is small making it hard for the study to generalize to the entire population. When 256 participants are broken down into four groups it becomes even more of a small sample size issue. Another limitation is that the participants had to self-record their results making it easy to lie about the amount of alcohol that they actually used over the three months.

Armitage, Christopher J., Arden, Madelynne A. (2012). A volitional help sheet to reduce alcohol consumption in the general population: A field experiment. Prevention Science, 13(6), 635-643.

Abstract