 Richard Longabaugh, Ed.D., is professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and Associate Director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. As the recipient of the 1999 Dan Anderson Research Award. Longabaugh was honored for his work as the lead author of a Project MATCH research report that showed the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous for a large subgroup of alcoholic clients.
The study, "Network support for drinking, Alcoholics Anonymous and long-term matching effects," coauthored by Philip Wirtz, Allen Zweben and Robert Stout, was published in Addiction (1998, Vol. 93, No. 9, pages 1313-1333). It had two main findings. 1. The study found that Twelve Step Facilitation Therapy (TSF) was significantly more effective than Motivational-Enhancement Therapy (MET) at three-year follow-up, among alcohol-dependent clients who had networks supportive of drinking (ie, a high percentage of family members and friends were drinkers and less supportive of abstinence), while this was not the case for clients whose social networks were unsupportive of drinking. The study showed no significant difference between the two groups after one year of treatment. But three years after therapy, the TSF group with networks supportive of drinking had 83 percent abstinent days compared with 66 percent abstinent days for the MET group. 2. The study also found that people with social environments where there is strong support for drinking have higher abstinence rates if they attend Alcoholics Anonymous, compared with people who do not attend AA, regardless of the initial treatment they receive. Longabaugh's study focused on one of 21 matching variables studied by Project MATCH, by far the largest randomized clinical trial intended to test treatment -matching effects. Network support for drinking was one of only four matching variables to show a matching effect. Longabaugh's study is significant not only because it tells which treatment works best for a large group of clients, but more importantly, it identifies one of the factors that is responsible for the superior effectiveness of TSF, AA participation. "Our study has clear clinical significance," said Longabaugh. "It tells the clinician that once we know the client's support for drinking, we know how important the AA component can be to his or her recovery." Longabaugh, who has been a faculty member at Brown since 1972, served as chair of the Steering and Executive Committees of Project MATCH from 1991-1992. He has authored or coauthored over 100 publications on addiction and recovery. |
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