A paid radio advertising campaign to promote parent-child communication about alcohol.

This study assessed the impact of a paid radio commercial designed to promote parent-child communication about alcohol use and sponsored by the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services, Massachusetts Department of Public Health. A random-digit-dial telephone survey of parents or guardians of children ages 10-17 years was conducted after a four-week advertising flight. Respondents with unassisted recall of the commercial more often disagreed that parent-child discussion is useful only if children have begun to experiment with alcohol, and more often reported having three or more parent-child discussions about alcohol compared to those who did not recall the commercial. Findings suggest the potential benefit of paid media campaigns to encourage parents to talk with their children about alcohol.

The reliability of the Massachusetts Substance Abuse Management Information System.

State substance abuse management information systems increasingly are becoming important tools for research, program management, and policy formulation at federal and state levels. These systems are currently undergoing radical expansion, leading to the creation of statewide performance and outcome monitoring systems for publicly-funded substance abuse treatment. This expansion makes imperative increased knowledge of the psychometric properties of the data in these systems. This study develops a method for examining the reliability of such data and applies it to the Massachusetts Substance Abuse Management Information System (SAMIS). Cohen's kappa, intraclass correlations, and the techniques of Heise (1969) are used to assess the reliability of different types of variables. Results show that key variables on the SAMIS Admission Form exhibit moderate to high reliability, supporting the use of this data for aggregate analyses. At the same time, caution should be used in making judgments about individual patients.