Alcohol use disorders are damaging personal and social problems. One reason these disorders remain so costly is that individuals with alcohol problems go undetected and consequently, opportunities for intervention are missed. In order to minimize the harm and cost associated with alcohol problems, their early and accurate identification is vital. While considerable work has been done on the validity of scores generated by alcohol screening measures, relatively little information is available on their reliability. In order to improve understanding of how scores from these measures perform and give healthcare providers an enhanced empirical foundation to refer to when using them, three specific aims are outlined: (1) To perform reliability generalizations (RGs) of the 25 self report alcohol screening measures recognized by NIAAA, (2) to develop and test new methods of analyzing RG data, and (3) to perform dissemination activities including publishing the results of the proposed activities in alcohol research journals, presenting the results at professional conferences, and maintaining a content oriented WWW site. Reliability Generalization studies have two main objectives: (1) to characterize the typical reliability of scores for a measure and (2) to examine factors that may be related to the reliability of those scores. This method allows for the integration of all published research using the identified measures and, therefore, a far broader analysis of scores generated by the measures than would be possible in any one study. This will be accomplished by performing through literature reviews of each measure, extracting and coding reliability coefficients and the test and sample characteristics provided in the literature, and analyzing this data in order to determine which characteristics are associated with scores having greater or lesser reliability. Results will be immediately useful in assisting healthcare providers and researchers select the most appropriate alcohol screening measure to use for their purpose.
| Shields, Alan L; Howell, Ryan T; Potter, Jennifer Sharpe et al. (2007) The Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test and its shortened form: a meta-analytic inquiry into score reliability. Subst Use Misuse 42:1783-800 |
| Shields, Alan L; Hufford, Michael R (2005) Assessing motivation to change among problem drinkers with and without co-occurring major depression. J Psychoactive Drugs 37:401-8 |
| Shields, Alan L; Guttmannova, Katarina; Caruso, John C (2004) An examination of the factor structure of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test in two high-risk samples. Subst Use Misuse 39:1161-82 |
