Search

In Victoria (a southern Australian state) in 1995, Narcotics Anonymous had a small but growing membership providing an opportunity to study the early experience of new self-help members. Ninety-one new members were interviewed and 62 (68%) were reinterviewed after 12 months. Three measures of self-help participation were examined: service role involvement, step work, and stable meeting attendance. Lower prior involvement in treatment services and greater participation in self-help predicted subsequent self-help participation. Higher levels of secondary school education predicted service role involvement and longer periods in stable meeting attendance. Higher self-help participation through the 12 months prior to follow-up was associated with lower levels of hazardous alcohol use and higher emotional support at reinterview. Multivariate regression analysis suggested stable self-help meeting attendance and step work continued to predict reductions in hazardous alcohol use and improvements in social support, after controlling for a range of alternative predictors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The alcohol consumption of a systematically sampled population of women from an Australian inner-urban community was measured using the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test) in three different ways to produce varying estimations of hazardous and harmful drinking. The study was located in an area in which there is a high density of licensed premises and its female population contains large numbers of women who are young, students and professionals and thus considered to be potentially risky drinkers. Five hundred and twenty-five women returned completed questionnaires giving a response rate of 74%. Using an AUDIT score of eight as the cut-off point, 21% of women were classified as being at risk of having problems associated with their alcohol consumption. These women were more likely than women who scored less than eight to be beer drinkers, to drink at licensed premises and drink with male and female friends. An association between higher AUDIT scores and being unmarried was found. This paper argues that investigating the social and contextual factors associated with women's potentially problematic drinking can promote more effective community-based interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Established in 2006, the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR) is Australia's only research centre with a primary focus on alcohol policy. CAPR has four main areas of research: alcohol policy impacts; alcohol policy formation and regulatory processes involved in implementing alcohol policies; patterns and trends in drinking and alcohol problems in the population; and the influence of drinking norms, cultural practices and social contexts, particularly in interaction with alcohol policies. In this paper, we give examples of key publications in each area. During the past decade, the number of staff employed at CAPR has increased steadily and now hovers at approximately 10. CAPR has supported the development of independent researchers who collaborate on a number of international projects, such as the Alcohol's Harm to Others study which is now replicated in approximately 30 countries. CAPR receives core funding from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and staff have been highly successful in securing additional competitive research funding. In 2016, CAPR moved to a new institutional setting at La Trobe University and celebrated 10 years of operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]