DIFFICULTIES WITH QUESTIONS ON USUAL DRINKING AND THE MEASUREMENT OF ALCOHOL-CONSUMPTION

Questions about usual drinking play an important role in the construct ion of alcohol consumption measures. However, little is known about di fficulties in answering these questions for respondents with variabili ty in their drinking patterns. We investigated this in a community sam ple of 945 drinkers and in a clinical sample of 400 patients treated f or alcohol and/or drug problems. Demographic variables were not consis tently related to self-reported difficulty in answering, but a diagnos is of current DSM-IV alcohol dependence was significantly related in b oth samples. In modeling the relationship between alcohol consumption and DSM-IV alcohol dependence, the fit of the model to the data was si gnificantly improved by the addition of a variable indicating responde nts' difficulty answering the usual drinking questions. Using this inf ormation in the development of alcohol consumption questions may provi de more precise estimates of the risk from alcohol consumption to outc omes such as alcohol dependence.