A Scoping Review of “Responsible Drinking” Interventions

ABSTRACT

Public health groups, researchers, the beverage alcohol industry, and other stakeholders have promoted and applied the concept of “responsible drinking” for the past 50 years. However, little is known about the state of the existing responsible drinking evaluation research and its application to policy and practice. This project provides a scoping review of studies evaluating responsible drinking interventions. Two primary research questions guided this investigation: (1) To what extent have authors attempted to define the concept of responsible drinking while evaluating responsible drinking interventions? and (2) What is the state of the responsible drinking intervention evaluation literature? We retrieved 49 peer-reviewed articles that evaluated interventions designed to promote “responsible drinking.” Four articles provided, or attempted to provide, an explicit definition of responsible drinking; these four definitions lacked consensus. The existing responsible drinking interventions varied considerably in terms of the messages they attempted to convey (e.g., avoid binge drinking, use protective behavioral strategies, stick to relatively safe drinking limits), again suggesting lack of consensus. We observed greater consensus concerning the approach to evaluating responsible drinking interventions: studies typically recruited college students to complete brief, well-controlled experiments and measured potential predictors of drinking behavior (e.g., attitudes, expectancies, intentions) rather than actual drinking behavior. We discuss limitations of this methodological approach and the need for greater consensus regarding the concept of responsible drinking.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. We used the search terms “responsibl*” AND “(drink* OR alcohol* OR beer OR liquor OR wine OR consumption)” in PsycINFO. We restricted this search to English-language articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We identified 2,423 articles.

2. Additionally, we coded these studies according to the levels of evidence typology provided by Ackley, Swan, Ladwig, and Tucker (2008). However, we concluded that this information was redundant with our codes of each study’s design type, so we excluded it from this study.

3. By our calculation, 3 studies randomly assigned participants to conditions but did not use true control conditions. Rather, they used comparison conditions. Another study used only partial randomization to assignment. We designated these studies to be RCTs. We understand that reasonable people might disagree with this designation but felt that RCT was the most appropriate category, among the available options.

Additional information

Funding

The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility, a foundation that receives funding from the alcohol industry, funded this research. The Online Supplemental Material lists other sources of funding for the authors and the Division on Addiction beyond this particular research.