- Title
- Inaccuracies in survey reporting of alcohol consumption
- Creator
- Gilligan, Conor; Anderson, Kristen G.; Ladd, Benjamin O.; Yong, Yun Ming; David, Michael
- Relation
- BMC Public Health Vol. 19, no. 1639
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7987-3
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Background: Alcohol consumption estimates in public health predominantly rely on self-reported survey data which is likely to underestimate consumption volume. Surveys tend to ask specifically about standard drinks and provide a definition or guide in an effort to gather accurate estimates. This study aimed to investigate whether the inclusion of the term standard drinks with pictorial guide is associated with an adjustment in self-reported alcohol volume. Methods: A web-based survey was administered with AUDIT-C questions repeated at the beginning and end of the survey with and without the standard drink term and guide. The order in which respondents were presented with the different question types was randomised. Two cohorts of university/college students in NSW Australia (n = 122) and the US Pacific Northwest (n = 285) completed the survey online. Results: Australian students did not adjust their responses to questions with and without the standard drink term and pictorial guide. The US students were more likely to adjust their responses based on the detail of the question asked. Those US students who drank more frequently and in greater volume were less likely to adjust/apply a conversion to their consumption. Conclusions: This study supports previous findings of the inaccuracy of alcohol consumption volume in surveys, but also demonstrates that an assumption of underestimation cannot be applied to all individual reports of consumption. Using additional questions to better understand drink types and serving sizes is a potential approach to enable accurate calculation of underestimation in survey data.
- Subject
- standard drink; surveys; measures; underestimation; alcohol
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1428895
- Identifier
- uon:38666
- Identifier
- ISSN:1471-2458
- Rights
- This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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