This study had poor methodology. There was no effort to stop the people in the control group from attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the "Alcoholics Anonymous" treatment patients underwent in the Brandsma study did not use actual Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. "The control condition allowed for participation in actual AA meetings, while those in the AA condition attended a weekly AA-like meeting administered by the study (that was not an actual AA meeting)"That might not have been neutral, so another editor tried to make that paragraph more balanced:
Notably, there was no effort to stop the people in the control group from attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the "Alcoholics Anonymous" treatment patients underwent in the Brandsma study did not use community Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. A later critical analysis noted: "the control condition allowed for participation in actual AA meetings, while those in the AA condition attended a weekly AA-like meeting administered by the study (that was not an actual AA meeting)"I feel this wording undermines the significant criticism Kaskutas 2009 has about Brandsma 1980, so I reworded it again, hopefully more neutral:
There was no effort to stop the people in the control group from attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The "Alcoholics Anonymous" treatment patients underwent in the Brandsma study did not use community Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; a later analysis says that there are "concerns with the Brandsma trial which call its experimental results into question" because "the control condition allowed for participation in actual AA meetings, while those in the AA condition attended a weekly AA-like meeting administered by the study (that was not an actual AA meeting)"This study has been heavily abused
I think this is pretty neutral, especially in light of just how problematic Brandsma 1980 is, especially when quoted out of context in anti-AA polemics. As just one example of this, here is how Dodes’s The Sober Truth describes Brandsma 1980:
The investigators found “significantly more binge drinking at the 3-month follow-up” among the people assigned to the AA-oriented meetings. As the year mark approached, the researchers noted, “All of the lay-RBT clients reported drinking less during the last 3 months. This was significantly better than the AA or the control groups at the 0.005 level [meaning the finding was highly statistically significant].” The final data led the researchers to conclude: “In this analysis the AA group was five times more likely to binge than the control group and nine times more likely than the lay-RBT group. The AA group average was 2.4 binges in the last 3 months.”Brandsma, who passed away in 2008, is probably rolling in his grave that his legacy is this particular study that he did in 1979-1980 being misrepresented. Scott Alexander, in his blog, does not view how this study has been abused very kindly:
Brandsma (1980) is the study beloved of the AA hate groups, since it purports to show that people in Alcoholics Anonymous not only don’t get better, but are nine times more likely to binge drink than people who don’t go into AA at all.
There are a number of problems with this conclusion. First of all, if you actually look at the study, this is one of about fifty different findings. [...]
Second of all, the increased binge drinking was significant at the 6 [this is an error; it was at three months we saw the increased binge drinking] month followup period. It was not significant at the end of treatment, the 3 month [Scott probably means 6-month] followup period, the 9 month followup period, or the 12 month followup period. Remember, taking a single followup result out of the context of the other followup results is a classic piece of Dark Side Statistics and will send you to Science Hell.Scott also has the same issues with this study Kaskutas 2009 had:
Brandsma didn’t use a real AA group, because the real AA groups make people be anonymous which makes it inconvenient to research stuff. He just sort of started his own non-anonymous group, let’s call it A, with no help from the rest of the fellowship, and had it do Alcoholics Anonymous-like stuff. On the other hand, many members of his control group went out into the community and…attended a real Alcoholics Anonymous, because Brandsma can’t exactly ethically tell them not to. So technically, there were more people in AA in the no-AA group than in the AA group.Point being, this study has been criticized for its methodological problems, abused by people more interested in attacking AA than in objective facts, and has possibly done more harm than good in finding out the truth of Alcoholics Anonymous’s efficacy.
