After discussing how the people who were successful in Moos and Moos 2006 were compliant (which is just another way to word the "self selection bias" problem), Dodes writes this:
The Moos study also employs some objectionable statistical methods. In one critical omission, its conclusions ignore all the people who died and the large number of people who dropped out of the study altogether, despite conceding that these were the people who statistically consumed the most alcohol. As early as year eight, the number of subjects who were left in AA had already shrunk by nearly 40 percent (from 269 to 166), yet these people are erased from the conclusions as if they had never existed at all. Add up all the people who died and the dropouts, and the results for AA become far grimmer than the authors suggest.Dodes is flat out inaccurate here. The multiple Moos studies which use the same subjects, including Moos and Moos 2006, had a total of 628 people who said they would participate in the studies. Moos and Moos 2006 looks at 461 of them. We have a drop out rate (in other words, people who elected to be in the study but didn't follow up) of under 27%, yet Dodes is stating Moos/Moos 2006 had a drop out rate of 40%. It would appear Dodes is confusing the number of people who stopped going to meetings with the number of people who didn't do two or more follow-ups; while these are both "drop outs", they are very different figures.
What Moos and Moos measured was this: Of the 115 people who were heavily involved with AA in the first year, and who did two or more follow ups, 77 of them (67%) were sober 16 years later.
What about those 167 subjects in Moos and Moos 2006 who didn't do two or more follow ups? We can go back to Timko and Moos 1993, the one-year follow-up study which used the same subjects. Here, they look at 515 of those 628 people. Even when looking at a larger subset of subjects, we get the same level of people who tried AA: Moos and Moos 2006 has 269 of the 461 subjects studied who tried AA in their first year (that's 58%). Timko and Moos 2003 has 294 of the 515 subjects trying AA in their first year (57%). It would appear that the drop outs who did not finish two or more surveys did not significantly affect the results.
Dodes continues:
The stated size of this survey is also misleading. Although the researchers began with 628 people, the total number of people who remained through the sixteen-year follow-up and also stayed in AA for longer than six months -- that is, the group on which the authors’ major findings are based -- was just 107, or 17 percent of the original sample. And of the remaining 107, the researchers never revealed the actual number of people who improved, or even stayed sober. They told us only which group "had better outcomes."Dodes, again, is not correctly reading Moos and Moos 2006. First of all, there were 115 (not 107) people heavily involved with AA in the first year. Moos and Moos 2006, in addition, looked very closely at the number of people who were sober 16 years later: "Individuals who received 27 weeks or more of [Alcoholics Anonymous] treatment in the first year were more likely to be abstinent and less likely to have drinking problems at 16 years than were individuals who remained untreated in the first year." In addition, Moos and Moos 2006 tells us exactly how many people in that group were sober 16 years later in Table 3: 67% of 115. I will save Dr. Dodes the bother of bringing out a calculator: That's 77 people. I can not see how Dodes can look at Moos and Moos 2006 and claim it did not state how many people who took AA seriously were sober 16 years later.
In terms of other factors, table 2 of Moos and Moos 2006 shows a strong correlation between AA treatment and improvement in both self-efficacy and social functioning. To quote Moos/Moos 2006: "a longer duration of AA was independently related to a higher likelihood of 16-year abstinence, enhanced self-efficacy, and good social functioning, and less likelihood of 16-year drinking problems."
As far as I can tell, Dodes did not even fully read Moos and Moos 2006 before writing up a polemic trying to discredit its numbers. I expected better.
Let's get some real figures for AA success: Moos and Moos 2006 showed that 67% of the people who took AA seriously were sober 16 years later. If the self section issue is problematic and you want experimental studies, both Litt et al. 2009 and Walitzer 2009 show that correctly getting subjects in the rooms of 12-step meetings work better than other addiction treatments. Bottom line, AA works.
