The characteristics of alcoholics in treatment arrested for Driving While Impaired

Relationships were explored between various characteristics and Driving While Impaired (DWI) arrests, within a sample of 258 hospitalized male alcoholics. Information on four groups of variables were collected using a self-administered questionnaire: socio-demographic characteristics, drinking characteristics, driving characteristics and psychosocial characteristics. Subjects were subdivided into three groups; those with zero DWI arrests, one DWI arrest and multiple DWI arrests. The results of bivariate analyses showed that while Groups 0 and 1 were very similar to each other, those in Group 2 differed significantly from at least one of the other two groups for about one half of the variables studied. A multivariate discriminant analyses demonstrated that there were no important differences between people with 0 and 1 DWI arrests, as people with one arrest were usually classified as having zero arrests.