A new study has been done and some of the results have been given to the news media in advance of full publication in February 2010. The study included men and women with two or more driving while impaired convictions. These people were then appointed to one of two interventions. The first intervention was a 30-minute brief motivational interviewing session, in which participants were encouraged to review personal reasons for change. The other was a “control” intervention where participants received information about the hazards of driving while impaired.
It was found that the brief motivational interviewing intervention was 30 percent more effective than the control program in reducing the number of “risky drinking days” for up to one year. A “risky drinking day is when an individual drank enough on a given day that he or she would probably be impaired if they were to drive shortly after.
According to the study’s head investigator Thomas G. Brown, ”What is new here is that this may be the first published report of a beneficial effect of a very brief version of motivational interviewing with individuals who are not in a clinical setting, not particularly motivated to reconsider their drinking (as an individual in an emergency room following an injury might be), and who are generally considered to be hardcore drunk drivers….Nonetheless, the results underscore how, in the right hands, even very brief psychosocial interventions can have important and enduring effects in individuals who are often seen as impervious to change.”
SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, news release, Nov. 19, 2009
