Do Individual and Situational Factors Explain the Link Between Predrinking and Heavier Alcohol Consumption? An Event-Level Study of Types of Beverage Consumed and Social Context

Aim: Predrinking (drinking in private settings before going to licensed premises) has been shown to be positively associated with amount of alcohol consumed. The present study assesses whether this association is explained by general drinking patterns or situational factors, including drinking duration, beverage type and drinking companions. Methods: In a sample of 183 young adults from French-speaking Switzerland, data on alcohol consumption, whereabouts and drinking companions were collected using questionnaires sent to participants' cell phones at five time points from 5 p.m. to midnight every Thursday, Friday and Saturday over five consecutive weeks. Means and proportion tests and multilevel models were conducted based on 6650 assessments recorded on 1441 evenings. Results: Over the study period, predrinkers drank more frequently than did non-predrinkers and, among males, predrinkers drank more heavily. Predrinking was related to increased drinking duration and thus total consumption in the evenings. Larger groups of people were reported for predrinking compared with off-premise only drinking situations. Among women, the consumption of straight spirits (i.e. not mixed with soft drinks) while predrinking was associated with higher total evening alcohol consumption. Among men, drinking with exclusively male friends or female friends while predrinking was associated with higher consumption. Conclusion: Heavier drinking on predrinking evenings mainly results from longer drinking duration, with individual and situational factors playing a smaller role. Prevention efforts on reducing the time that young adults spend drinking and harm reduction measures such as restriction of access to on-premise establishments once intoxicated are recommende

A quasi-randomized group trial of a brief alcohol intervention on risky single occasion drinking among secondary school students

Objectives: To show the effectiveness of a brief group alcohol intervention. Aims of the intervention were to reduce the frequency of heavy drinking occasions, maximum number of drinks on an occasion and overall weekly consumption. Methods: A cluster quasi-randomized control trial (intervention n=338; control n=330) among 16- to 18-year-old secondary school students in the Swiss Canton of Zürich. Groups homogeneous for heavy drinking occasions (5+/4+ drinks for men/women) consisted of those having medium risk (3-4) or high risk (5+) occasions in the past 30days. Groups of 8-10 individuals received two 45-min sessions based on motivational interviewing techniques. Results: Borderline significant beneficial effects (p<0.10) on heavy drinking occasions and alcohol volume were found 6months later for the medium-risk group only, but not for the high-risk group. None of the effects remained significant after Bonferroni corrections. Conclusions: Group intervention was ineffective for all at-risk users. The heaviest drinkers may need more intensive treatment. Alternative explanations were iatrogenic effects among the heaviest drinkers, assessment reactivity, or reduction of social desirability bias at follow-up through peer feedbac

DrinkSense: Characterizing Youth Drinking Behavior using Smartphones

Alcohol consumption is the number one risk factor for morbidity and mortality among young people. In late adolescence and early adulthood, excessive drinking and intoxication are more common than in any other life period, increasing the risk of adverse physical and psychological health consequences. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of using smartphone sensor data and machine learning to automatically characterize and classify drinking behavior of young adults in an urban, ecologically valid nightlife setting. Our work has two contributions. First, we use previously unexplored data from a large-scale mobile crowdsensing study involving 241 young participants in two urban areas in a European country, which includes phone data (location, accelerometer, Wit, Bluetooth, battery, screen, and app usage) along with self-reported, fine-grain data on individual alcoholic drinks consumed on Friday and Saturday nights over a three-month period. Second,we build a machine learning methodology to infer whether an individual consumed alcohol on a given weekend night, based on her/his smartphone data contributed between 8 PM and 4 AM. We found that accelerometer data is the most informative single cue, and that a combination of features results in an overall accuracy of 76.6 percent

Changes in Substance Use and Other Reinforcing Behaviours During the COVID-19 Crisis in a General Population Cohort Study of Young Swiss Men

There are concerns about the potential impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on substance use (SU) and other reinforcing behaviours (ORB). This paper investigates changes in SU and ORB among young men during the COVID-19 crisis (i.e. March-June 2020). Before and during the COVID-19 crisis, 2,344 young Swiss men completed questionnaires covering SU (i.e. alcohol, cigarettes, illegal cannabis), ORB (i.e. gaming, watching TV series, internet pornography) and sociodemographic and work-related characteristics (i.e. deterioration in the work situation, change in working hours, change in working hours from home, healthcare workers' and other professionals' contacts with potentially infected people, linguistic region, call up to military or civil protection unit, living situation, age). Latent-change score models showed significant decreases of 17% for drinking volume and frequency of heavy episodic drinking, and a significant increase of 75% for time spent gaming and watching TV series. Subgroups showed greater relative increases. French-speaking participants, those who experienced a deterioration in their work situation and healthcare workers in contact with potentially infected people reported increased cigarette use. Those without children increased gaming, whereas those who worked fewer hours, experienced a deterioration in their work situation or were French-speaking did more gaming and watched more TV series. Those who lived alone or were German-speaking watched more internet pornography. During the COVID-19 crisis, young Swiss men drank less alcohol and spent more time gaming and watching TV series. Changes in SU and ORB were not homogenous in the young Swiss men population

Development and first validation of the Refined Alcohol Expectancy Task (RAET).

Addressing limitations of existing self-report measures of alcohol-related thoughts and behaviours, researchers have begun to measure these pictographically. To date, however, these novel measures have been developed somewhat unsystematically and are predicated on a number of potentially problematic assumptions, meaning that researchers have not been able to assess their reliability or validity fully. This report therefore documents the development of a Refined Alcohol Expectancy Task through (1) selection (2) development and (3) testing of stimuli for inclusion of this pictograph-based tasks. It also provides initial validation data. Key findings: • This paper outlines the development and initial validation of a pictorial measure of alcohol-related beliefs, namely the Refined Alcohol Expectancy Task (RAET) • Participants were equally efficient in recognising the alcoholic and non-alcoholic pictures and could identify the emotions in the pictographic representations • The RAET has adequate psychometric properties and successfully assesses alcohol expectancies • Expectancy dimensions assessed by the RAET seemed to be independent of drinking habit

Florian Labhart's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

ICAT: Development of an internet-based data collection method for ecological momentary assessment using personal cell phones

Contains fulltext : 116530.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Rapid advances in mobile data-transfer technologies offer new possibilities in the use of cell phones to conduct assessments of a person’s natural environment in real time. This paper describes features of a new Internet-based, cell phone-optimized assessment technique (ICAT), which consists of a retrospective baseline assessment combined with text messages sent to the participants’ personal cell phones providing a hyperlink to an Internet-stored cell phone-optimized questionnaire. Two participation conditions were used to test variations in response burden. Retention rates, completion rates, and response times in different subgroups were tested by means of χ² tests, Cox regression, and logistic regression. Among the 237 initial participants, we observed a retention rate of 90.3% from the baseline assessment to the cell-phone part, and 80.4% repeated participation in the 30 daily assessments. Each day, 40–70% of the questionnaires were returned, a fourth in less than 3 minutes. Qualitative interviews underscored the ease of use of ICAT. This technique appears to be an innovative, convenient, and cost-effective way of collecting data on situational characteristics while minimizing recall bias. Because of its flexibility, ICAT can be applied in various disciplines, whether as part of small pilot studies or large-scale, crosscultural, and multisite research projects.9 p

The country-level effects of drinking, heavy drinking and drink prices on pre-drinking: An international comparison of 25 countries.

Introduction and Aims. The practice and adverse consequences of pre-drinking have been documented within a dozen countries, but little remains known about the differences between countries or the country-specific determinants of pre-drinking. This study aims to estimate the percentage of pre-drinkers in different countries and the impact of country-level indicators such as the price of alcohol and the prevalence of drinkers and of heavy drinkers. Design and Methods. Using data from the Global Drug Survey, the percentage of pre-drinkers was estimated for 25 countries from 65 126 respondents. Bivariate and multivariate multilevel models were used to model the impact of the on-premise/off-premise drinks price ratio, the prevalence of current drinkers and of heavy drinkers on the percentage of pre-drinkers. Results. The estimated percentage of pre-drinkers per country ranged from 17.7% (Greece) to 85.4% (Ireland). Across all countries, the higher the prevalence of current drinkers, the higher the percentage of pre-drinkers. In addition, an interaction between the prevalence of heavy drinkers and the price ratio was found. In countries with a low price ratio, the higher the prevalence of heavy drinkers, the higher the percentage of pre-drinkers. The opposite effect was observed in countries with high price ratios. Discussion and Conclusions. Pre-drinking appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. The significant effects of all three indicators demonstrate the role of country-level determinants underpinning the prevalence of pre-drinking across countries. Policy makers could use the reported findings for initiating campaigns to reduce pre-drinking behaviour

Understanding Heavy Drinking at Night through Smartphone Sensing and Active Human Engagement

Heavy alcohol consumption can lead to many severe consequences. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of heavy drinking at night (4+ drinks for women or 5+ for men on a single evening), using a smartphone sensing dataset depicting about nightlife and drinking behaviors for 240 young adult participants. Our work has three contributions. First, we segment nights into moving and static episodes as anchors to aggregate mobile sensing features. Second, we show that young adults tend to be more mobile, have more activities, and attend more crowded areas outside home on heavy drinking nights compared to other nights. Third, we develop a machine learning framework to classify a given weekend night as involving heavy or non-heavy drinking, comparing automatically captured sensor features versus manually contributed contextual cues and images provided over the course of the night. Results show that a fully automatic approach with phone sensors results in an accuracy of 71%. In contrast, manual input of context of drinking events results in an accuracy of 70%; and visual features of manually contributed images produce an accuracy of 72%. This suggests that automatic sensing is a competitive approach