How brief can you get?




Three pioneering studies which have stood the test of time. All British, they showed that alcohol problems could be reduced without intensive (and expensive) treatments. The implications were immense, the controversy fierce.

British studies made a clean sweep of the top three places in a competitive international league – the world’s most cited alcohol treatment trials. Up to the end of 1995 three UK studies^{[i], [ii], [iii]} had logged the greatest number of references recorded by the Science Citation Index, indicative of their influence on other researchers, their scientific standing, and their social/political relevance.^[iv] Even more remarkable, among studies of psychosocial interventions, they also logged the highest annual citation rate.^[v]

All over a decade old, any one of the studies would have warranted its own Old Gold stamp. What persuaded us to treat them as a unit was the fact that all three tackled how to do as much as possible with as little as was needed. Along with some other notable and mainly European studies, they seeded the ‘brief interventions’^[i] debate which is still a priority for researchers and practitioners.

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