Decomposing the relationships between pretreatment social network characteristics and alcohol treatment outcome.

Objective: In Project MATCH a summary measure of network support for drinking identified matching and prognostic effects. The goals of the present analyses were (1) to determine which of the 11 component indexes are most predictive of treatment outcome regardless of treatment type and (2) to determine which of the indexes are most influential in the already demonstrated network support by treatment interaction effect.

Method: This is a secondary data analysis of the outpatient arm of Project MATCH (N = 952), focusing primarily on the Important People and Activities instrument administered pretreatment.

Results: Patients with larger daily networks and patients with more abstainers/recovering alcoholics in their networks had a better prognosis. Patients with a higher network drinking frequency did better in Twelve Step Facilitation than in Motivational Enhancement Therapy.

Conclusions: Three of the 11 indexes can be used to replicate the prognostic and matching effects found for an overall index of network support. These may be measured by a short form of the Important People and Activities instrument.