"There is always a use for improved assessment devices and for those interested in relatively brief assessment of drinking problems in college students," observed Kenneth J. Sher, Curators' Professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri - Columbia. "The new scale appears to be one that potential users should seriously consider. The major utility of the scale is its brevity and good resolution across a range of drinking problems."
For this study, 340 (164 males, 176 females) college students who drank on at least a weekly basis were recruited. Researchers used a statistical technique called "Rasch model analysis" to examine responses to a new 48-item measure, the Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire, which was designed for each item to be scored as either present or absent, easing administration and scoring of the instrument.
"We used the Rasch model to identify whether certain questions are redundant with one another, whether all items measure the same general content area, and whether responses to the questions are orderly, that is, do people who say 'yes' to more severe or more rare problems also say 'yes' to less severe and more common problems?" said Kahler.
Analysis produced a final 24-item scale that the study authors say "showed excellent distributional properties, had items adequately matched to the severity of alcohol problems in the sample, covered a full range of problem severity, and appeared highly efficient in retaining all of the meaningful variance captured by the original set of 48 items."
"I believe the major contribution of this paper is both the derivation of a new instrument that holds the potential to be useful for assessing a prevalent problem in college students and, perhaps more important, to illustrate how alcohol researchers can use statistical analyses to improve measurement," said Sher. "The new scale's major strengths
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14-Jul-2005