Development and Pilot Test of a Novel Digital Social Support Intervention for Reducing Hazardous Alcohol Use

Community-based recovery organizations (e.g., mutual-help groups) can be a potent source of social support that facilitates addiction recovery. To increase awareness of and engagement with these organizations, we developed a digital intervention called Let's Do Addiction Recovery Together! (LDART) for individuals who want to reduce their hazardous alcohol use. LDART encourages daily goal-setting, provides motivational video messages from peers, and provides information on recovery organizations.

We conducted a single-arm study to evaluate feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of LDART. Thirty adults (mean age 44.5 years old, 53.8% women) who wanted to reduce their hazardous alcohol use were invited to use LDART for 28 nights. Participants completed an acceptability survey post-intervention, and a subset were interviewed to provide additional feedback. Measures of recovery organization engagement and alcohol use were collected pre-intervention, post-intervention, and at 1-month post-intervention and summarized using descriptive statistics.

The recruitment rate was 10 participants per month, and 76.7% of enrolled participants completed the post-treatment assessment. On average, participants accessed LDART on 22.9 out of 28 nights (81.8%). Most participants (81.0%) reported that they would recommend LDART to someone trying to cut down or quit drinking. Participants self-reported more recovery organization engagement and less alcohol consumption during the month they used LDART and the month after completing LDART, relative to the month prior to using LDART.

LDART was well-received by adults wanting to reduce drinking, as determined by engagement rates with LDART and acceptability ratings. Preliminary efficacy results warrant further testing of this intervention as a way to increase engagement with recovery organizations and decrease hazardous alcohol use.