Chapter three - History and Current Substance Use

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of empirically supported measures of alcohol and other drug consumption that can be applied in clinical and clinical research contexts. It is evident that a number of interview/self-report measures are available for use with adolescents or adults that vary sufficiently in content and resources needed for their application to meet virtually all clinical and clinical research needs. The field is rapidly advancing in the technology of biomarkers, each providing different types of information. For both self-report/interview and biomarker measures, there is no one gold standard of perfect accuracy, so the strategy most likely to yield the most accurate representation of an individual's substance use is one utilizing a convergent validity approach. Many excellent, empirically supported instruments have been developed to measure history of and current alcohol and other drug use. The characteristics of these instruments are varied enough to provide clinicians and researchers with reliable tools to meet any assessment need. This advanced level of development of self-report/interview methods of measuring alcohol and other drug consumption is a product of past and current emphasis on the use of empirically supported self-report or interview methods of data collection in both clinical and research contexts.