Alternative measures and models of hazardous consumption

Hazardous alcohol consumption has been conceptualized (1) as all alcohol consumed on days when some threshold, usually ≈60 g, is exceeded, and (2) as only that portion of intake that exceeds this threshold. The first measure is hypothesized to be a better predictor of acute alcohol-related outcomes, because of its greater capacity to discriminate between individuals who frequently exceed the hazardous threshold by a small amount and those who infrequently exceed the threshold by a large amount. To test this hypothesis, the two approaches were used to construct alternative estimates of a number of measures of hazardous consumption. Individually and in combination, these measures were compared in a series of multiplicative models predicting four alcohol-related outcomes: impaired driving, fighting, interpersonal problems and injuries. There was no consistent evidence for one approach being superior to the other as a predictor of these outcomes. In fact, the use of appropriate linear transformations of the consumption variables had a far greater effect on improving the proportion of variance explained. The most highly predictive models were those based on frequency of hazardous consumption, mean volume of hazardous intake consumed per hazardous drinking day, volume of nonhazardous intake and their interactions. Differences among models were small, and models using combinations of simple, easy-to-obtain measures performed nearly on a par with those utilizing far more complex measures.