Brief Internet Intervention for Hazardous Alcohol Use

February 7, 2017 updated by: John Cunningham, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online platform that has become a popular means of recruiting participants with problem drinking, gambling, or even illicit drug use for the purposes of survey-based research. There is also the possibility that potential participants could be identified through MTurk for online longitudinal studies, including for brief intervention research. The potential to quickly and easily identify large numbers of participants through MTurk is important for research evaluating online interventions during the period that these interventions are being developed and refined. However, before proposing MTurk workers as a viable source for participants in online intervention trials, it is important to evaluate the feasibility of using MTurk for such a purpose. This pilot study proposes to test this feasibility by systematically replicating a trial of an extensively evaluated brief online intervention for hazardous alcohol use (CheckYourDrinking; CYD) and will attempt to recruit and follow-up participants for this replication using people recruited through MTurk.

Participants will be recruited through Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing platform. Participants identified as problem drinkers based on an initial survey will be invited to complete another survey in 3 months time. Those who are interested will be randomized to receive access to the Check Your Drinking screener (CYD condition) or to a no additional information condition (control condition). At three-months post-baseline, the MTurk portal will be used to send invitation emails that contain a link to the follow-up survey. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that participants receiving access to the CYD intervention will report a greater level of reduction in number of drinks in a typical week between the baseline survey and three-month follow-up as compared to participants in the no information control condition.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

423

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • Canada
    • Ontario
      • Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2S1
        • Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

18 years and older (Adult, Older Adult)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Genders Eligible for Study

All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) score of 8 or more
  • Willingness to complete a 3-month follow-up survey
  • 18 years of age or older

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Other
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Single

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Check Your Drinking (CYD)
The CYD is a brief online intervention designed to provide personalized normative feedback aimed at motivating reductions in drinking
Behavioral: Check Your Drinking
No Intervention: Control
No Intervention Control

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Time Frame
Number of drinks consumed during a typical week
Time Frame: 3 months
3 months

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: John Cunningham, PhD, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

September 1, 2016

Primary Completion (Actual)

January 1, 2017

Study Completion (Actual)

January 1, 2017

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

September 14, 2016

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

September 14, 2016

First Posted (Estimate)

September 19, 2016

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Estimate)

February 8, 2017

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

February 7, 2017

Last Verified

February 1, 2017

More Information

Terms related to this study

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 075/2016

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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