- They don’t like the fact that those high success rate numbers only come from people who actively go to AA meetings. However, this is consistent with AA’s own claim that “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path” (emphasis mine)
- They claim the numbers are invalid because of “self selection bias”; in other words, they believe the people who are clean and sober because of AA would have gotten clean and sober anyway in an alternate universe where AA doesn’t exist. A 2014 paper demonstrates this actually isn’t the case.
- They complain that the studies do not include dropouts. However, the drop out rate is small enough to not significantly skew the numbers, especially since, most of the time, the dropouts undoubtedly 1) Didn’t work the AA program and 2) Didn’t get sober.
- They make other complaints about the methodology of the studies. However, this ignores the fact that these numbers have been pretty consistent across multiple longitudinal studies. Fiorentine 1999: 74.8% success rate. Moos and Moos 2006: 67% success rate 16 years later. The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited by George E. Vaillant has a table on page 197 showing that 19 out of 100 alcoholics attended 300 or more meetings over a 10-year period, of those 19, 14 were sober: 74% success rate. Witbrodt 2012 saw similar numbers: “high 12-step attendance (abstinence rates averaging 75%)”. AA’s own Big Book has the same abstinence rate using 1955 numbers: “Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses”
Friday, January 4, 2019
AA has a 67-75% success rate
Critics of the 12-step programs attempt to discredit the longitudinal studies, which show a 67-75% success rate for AA:
