The association of client characteristics and acceptance of harm reduction: A policy-capturing study of psychologists

Abstract

The current study employed a policy-capturing methodology to examine the degree to which selected client characteristics (i.e., years of drug use, previous drug treatment, criminal history, employment status, psychiatric history, HIV status, gender, race) were associated with psychologists’ ratings of the acceptability of two harm reduction interventions: needle exchange (NE) and short-term methadone (STM) treatment. A sample of psychologists were mailed a booklet containing 64 case profiles of injection drug users and asked to rate the acceptability of either NE or STM as an intervention for the client described in each profile. Ratings of the acceptability of NE were meaningfully correlated with profile clients’ number of previous treatment attempts and with profile clients’ being described as HIV positive. Acceptance of STM was generally lower than acceptance of NE, and acceptability ratings of STM were associated with profile clients’ number of previous treatment attempts, years of drug use, and employment and legal status.