Who under‐reports their alcohol consumption in telephone surveys and by how much? An application of the ‘yesterday method’ in a national Canadian substance use survey

Abstract

Alcohol consumption surveys can use the beverage-specific 'yesterday method' to correct for under-reporting of consumption among subgroups. Alcohol consumption among Canadians appears to be under-reported to an equal degree by men and women. Younger drinkers under-report alcohol consumption to a greater degree than do older drinkers, while low-risk drinkers underestimate more than do medium and high-risk drinkers.

Do “Moderate” Drinkers Have Reduced Mortality Risk? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Alcohol Consumption and All-Cause Mortality

“…We coded a drinking measure as "adequate" for the purpose of estimating average daily alcohol intake if both quantity and frequency of drinking were assessed for a period of at least 1 week. Given that simple quantity-frequency measures of drinking typically result in substantial underreporting (e.g., Stockwell et al, 2014), we recognize these are minimal criteria for adequacy of measurement, necessitated by the poor overall quality of drinking measures in this literature.…”

“…Such self-reported infrequent drinkers have been shown to greatly underreport their personal consumption (Stockwell et al, 2014;Ye et al, 2013). When studies assessed usual or typical drinking patterns over a month or a week, it was assumed that individuals classified as abstain-ers by this method would include occasional drinkers (e.g., abstaining in a typical week is still consistent with drinking less than once a week).…”

“…On the other hand, it can be argued that some low-volume drinkers are underestimating their consumption and are thus misclassified as occasional drinkers (Stockwell et al, 2014).…”

“…A major limitation involves imperfect measurement of alcohol consumption in most included studies. Self-reported alcohol consumption is mostly underreported (Stockwell et al, 2014), and even the classification of drinkers as lifetime abstainers can be unreliable (Kerr et al, 2002). The number of available studies in some stratified analyses was small, and therefore there may be limited power to control for potential study-level confounders.…”

Regionale Unterschiede in der Prävalenz von kardiovaskulären Risikofaktoren bei Männern und Frauen in Deutschland

“…Selbstangaben können zu einer Unterschätzung der tatsächlichen Prävalenz führen, vor allem für Alkoholkonsum [27,28] …”