Reliability of a Timeline Method: assessing normal drinkers' reports of recent drinking and a comparative evaluation across several populations

Abstract

Since alcohol research involves both clinical and non-clinical populations, it is important to evaluate drinking assessment methods across different subject populations. Over the past several years, the reliability of the timeline (TL) method of gathering retrospective reports of recent drinking has been evaluated in several studies, and this method has been shown to have generally high reliability with outpatient alcohol abusers, in-patient chronic alcoholics, and normal drinker college students. The present study examined the reliability of the TL method with normal drinkers in the general population. Similar to other populations, the test-retest reliability of male (n -31) and female (n = 31} normal drinkers' reports of recent drinking behaviour was found to be generally high. Data gathered by the TL method were also compared to data gathered from the same subjects using a common quantity-frequency (QF) method. Consistent with earlier reports, QF categorization provided a relatively insensitive measure of individual differences in drinking behaviour as compared to TL-derived data. Since the TL method has now been shown to have fairly good reliability for assessing recent drinking across a broad range of drinkers, it can be used for comparative evaluations of drinking behaviour across studies with different subject populations.

A Randomized Clinical Trial of Alcohol Care Management Delivered in Department of Veterans Affairs Primary Care Clinics Versus Specialty Addiction Treatment

“…The measure of drinking outcome was the Time Line Follow-Back (TLFB). 23,24 Drinking reports were recorded for the 60 days preceding enrollment, as well as during the intervention. Quantity of alcohol was recorded in standard drinks.…”

Differential Brain Activity in Alcoholics and Social Drinkers to Alcohol Cues: Relationship to Craving

“…On the day of the imaging session, subjects completed a battery of assessments including the Obsessive Compulsive Drinking Scale (OCDS) (Anton et al, 1996), the CIWA-Ar, a timeline followback for drinking data (TLFB) (Sobell et al, 1988), and a series of visual analog scales that assessed a variety of alcohol craving indices such as the amount of craving and frequency of craving. All scans took place around noon on each scanning day to minimize time of day confounds.…”

A Functional Polymorphism of the μ-Opioid Receptor Gene is Associated with Naltrexone Response in Alcohol-Dependent Patients

“…The ASI is a 1 h, structured interview that measures the lifetime and recent (past 30 days) severity of problems in seven areas of biopsychosocial functioning (represented by component scores): medical status, employment and self-support, alcohol use, drug use, legal status, family and social relations, and psychiatric symptoms (McLellan et al, 1985). The Time Line Follow-Back (TLFB) method measured alcohol consumption (Sobell et al, 1988;Sobell and Sobell, 1992) during the pretreatment and treatment periods. The TLFB is a semi-structured interview that uses a calendar format to record the quantity and frequency of drinking during a stated period of time.…”