Alcohol use among Swedes and a psychometric evaluation of the alcohol use disorders identification test

Abstract

The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) was completed by 997 persons randomly selected from the general Swedish population (80% response rate). Eighteen per cent of the men and 5% of the women had hazardous or harmful alcohol use according to the > or =8 score criterion. AUDIT scores decreased with increasing age in both genders. Women are more sensitive to alcohol than men and when the cut-off score was set to > or =6, the female prevalence of hazardous or harmful alcohol use increased to nearly 11%. The 'binge drinking' question explained half of the total AUDIT variance and is thus the best item indicator of hazardous or harmful alcohol use in the test. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses revealed two AUDIT basic factors, the first three items defining a 'hazardous consumption' factor and the other seven items an 'alcohol-related problems' factor. Both the internal and test- retest reliability of the Swedish version of AUDIT were satisfactory. A table for converting raw scores to non-normalized T-scores for each combination of gender and three age intervals is presented.