Assignment of Alcohol Drinks to CIDI Drink Categories

Overview

Alcohol consumption is a prevalent behavior in Western societies, which may produce feelings of happiness and sociability, but also increases the risk of individual and societal detriments. A detailed knowledge about individual and region-specific alcohol consumption is crucial in many aspects of health systems, from general practitioner's diagnostic evaluation to decisions on health-care related fundings for prevention programs by legislative and executive councils. The assessment of alcohol consumption often consists of questions like "What alcohol and in which amount did you drink lately?" which may be answered using a given list of prevalent alcoholic beverages. With this study, the investigators want to contribute to the understanding of psychological determinants in answering these questions. For example, it is not yet fully understood, to which extend and why certain beverages are assigned to one of several beverage groups. The investigators suspect that familiarity with specific beverages as well as product names may influence this assignment. In this online survey, which is open to any German-speaking alcohol user no matter how often or how much alcohol one normally consumes, participants will be presented a list of common beverages (e.g. Cuba Libre, Prosecco, Weizen) and asked to assign these beverages to one of several beverage groups (e.g. whiskey, beer, sparkling wine).

The investigators expect that alcohol users will assign alcoholic drinks based on the product names, which might lead to erroneous assignments to predefined drink groups in certain occasions (e.g. "Bierlikör - beer liquor"). Furthermore, it is hypothesized that this tendency is smaller the more familiar a user is with the drink. Lastly, it is hypothesized that drinks with relatively low use prevalence in the general population, e.g. sweet liquors and cocktails, and drinks that include alcohol mixed with non-alcoholic beverages (e.g. "Radler", a beer-lemonade mix), are more often subject to non-concordant assignment across participants compared to highly-prevalent drinks (e.g. "Pilsner"). Thus, the investigators expect alcohol users to: 1. assign \>90% of the presented beverages correctly, 2. differ from the expert assignments especially in drinks they are not familiar with, 3. differ from the expert assignments especially in drinks with ambiguous names, 4. do not differ in their assignments based on their gender and age group.