AUDIT, the alcohol use disorders identification test2007

THE ALCOHOL USE DISORDERS Identification Test (AUDIT; Babor et al., 2001; Saunders et al., 1993) was developed as a simple method to screen for hazardous and harmful patterns of alcohol consumption. The instrument consists of 10 questions purported to assess three conceptual domains (see Table 1): recent hazardous alcohol consumption (Items 1-3), alcohol dependence (Items 4-6), and harmful alcohol use (Items 7-10). Reporting on the psychometric properties and AUDIT guidelines for primary care, Babor et al. (2001) provided details on internal consistency and test-retest reliabilities as well as some information on its predictive and convergent validity. However, construct validity in terms of the AUDIT factor structure was not examined, although previous studies had assessed the dimensionality of the AUDIT with a variety of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) methods. These studies (Chung et al., 2002; E1-Bassel et al., 1998; Gmel et al., 2001; Karno et al., 2000; Kelly and Donovan, 2001; Maisto et al., 2000; Medina-Mora et al., 1998; O'Hare and Sherrer, 1999; Shields et al., 2004; Skipsey et al., 1997) identified one-, two-, and three-factor solutions.