Brief Internet Intervention for Hazardous Alcohol Use

Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online platform that has become a popular means of recruiting participants with problem drinking, gambling, or even illicit drug use for the purposes of survey-based research. There is also the possibility that potential participants could be identified through MTurk for online longitudinal studies, including for brief intervention research. The potential to quickly and easily identify large numbers of participants through MTurk is important for research evaluating online interventions during the period that these interventions are being developed and refined. However, before proposing MTurk workers as a viable source for participants in online intervention trials, it is important to evaluate the feasibility of using MTurk for such a purpose. This pilot study proposes to test this feasibility by systematically replicating a trial of an extensively evaluated brief online intervention for hazardous alcohol use (CheckYourDrinking; CYD) and will attempt to recruit and follow-up participants for this replication using people recruited through MTurk.

Participants will be recruited through Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing platform. Participants identified as problem drinkers based on an initial survey will be invited to complete another survey in 3 months time. Those who are interested will be randomized to receive access to the Check Your Drinking screener (CYD condition) or to a no additional information condition (control condition). At three-months post-baseline, the MTurk portal will be used to send invitation emails that contain a link to the follow-up survey. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that participants receiving access to the CYD intervention will report a greater level of reduction in number of drinks in a typical week between the baseline survey and three-month follow-up as compared to participants in the no information control condition.