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“Roughly 4 in 10 young adults who drink alcohol report drinking alone at least once in the past year,” said lead author Kasey Creswell, associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon.
Only 4 in 10? 6 in 10 young adults who drink alcohol never have a beer or glass of wine on a cozy evening in? I would have expected it to be the other way around.
Yeah, the exact question they’re studying is:
“When you used alcohol during the last year, how often did you use it in each of the following situations?…When you were alone.” Response options were 1 = “Not at all” 2 = “A few of the times” 3 = “Some of the times” 4 = “Most of the times” 5 = “Every time.”
And they’re comparing the “not at all” responses against all of the other ones. I understand they’re analyzing data that already exists, so they don’t get to go back in time and start asking a different question in 1977 when the survey begins, but I’m not sure how useful this is to the current analysis without some qualifier like “When you had three or more drinks in one day.”