Although the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) has been used as a tool for assessing alcohol abuse or addiction among teens, a recent study showed its effectiveness in predicting long-term alcohol abuse.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,” sampled 597 Finnish twins of both genders and used RAPI as a way to assess problems like alcohol abuse and dependence at age 18 and again at age 25.
Results confirmed a number of intuitions about early drinking, such as those who have palpable drinking problems in their youth often remain alcoholics into adulthood, said Helene White, a University professor of sociology at the Center of Alcohol Studies.
“The study is a pretty strong finding — especially since they picked twins, so they controlled for a lot of environmental factors,” said White, one of RAPI’s creators. “What the study is basically showing is that problem drinking among adolescents is a fairly stable behavior.”
Findings show that among those diagnosed with alcoholism at the age of 25, there was a 74 percent probability their RAPI scores as 18 year olds was higher than average, he said.
White said the real power of the study came in determining the value of RAPI as a diagnostic tool.
“If you’re going to diagnose someone with a problem, you want something that’s been clinically proven to be a good diagnostic instrument. When we published the RAPI, we weren’t claiming that it was,” White said. “Now I see this paper says that it has good predictive validity over time, so that’s important.”
While the study offers a new dimension to the RAPI as a clinical tool, White said the findings were not surprising, despite the study being the first of its kind.
“The clinical sample [we used] actually had the DSM-III, [a manual that provides standard criteria for classifying mental disorders], diagnosis for their adolescents and they also had the RAPI and it correlated at a 0.7, which is a very high correlation,” White said. “We knew it was measuring something very similar to more standardized diagnostic measures.”
Ryan Holland, a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore, said the fact that adolescents with drinking problems tend to become adults with drinking problems is understandable, but having a quality measure of what constitutes alcoholism is remarkable.
“If you show signs of alcoholic tendencies or patterns that could statistically reveal you will become an alcoholic, I think it makes sense that at least a significant percentage of those people will become alcoholics,” Holland said.
Lisa Latiman, director of the Alcohol and Other Drug Assistance Program, said the RAPI provides an effective measure of drinking problems and offers benefits as a supplement to already well-established counseling measures.
“There are actually a number of interventions a student can engage in,” Laitman said. “We looked at an intervention called the BASICS, which is a brief-intervention model, and it’s a method that is used to help young adults reduce their alcohol use and the negative consequences associated [with it].”
White said another advantage of the RAPI is it can be administered to a large number of individuals over a relatively short period of time, while traditional diagnostic measures rely on one-to-one, interview-based measure.
As it stands, the RAPI will need to undergo further scrutiny before any conclusions can be made about its effectiveness as a diagnostic tool, but any evidence toward this end is useful, Laitman said.
“Every article that supports the same idea gives it more support and gives more credibility to the issue itself,” she said. “You know, one study is good, but obviously several are a lot better.”