The future of alcohol surveys: Between the devil and the deep blue sea

The future of survey research in the alcohol field, as elsewhere, does look gloomy. Even if there is a need to better confront this reality, abandoning traditional survey methods does not guarantee better outcomes and is not an equally burning issue in all countries or surveys and for all objectives. Correcting biases is easier when the aim is to estimate the parameters of a consumption distribution than when the aim is to measure drinking patterns, their changes and subgroup differences. Combining data from various sources requires making assumptions that affect the results but that may be hard to base on evidence. Despite these challenges, alcohol researchers need to take steps in this direction to find out more about the situations and ways in which such new methods would best serve the field.