Intervention to Prevention

The cover image ranges from dark to light just as §intervention in alcohol addiction raises the soul §from despair and despondency to hope and health. §This book focuses on tools for building a model that §allows the investigator to understand the §relationships among the negative acute outcomes §related to alcohol consumption. This model, in turn, §can be used to develop a policy tool to study §interventions that minimize the probability §simultaneously of acute outcomes occurring. The §model is mathematically and statistically based; in §particular, it is an agent-based, time-dependent §stochastic hierarchical directed graph model that §also includes the social network phenomena. The §mathematical underpinnings of this model involve §probability theory, graph theory, and social network §analysis. This book presents a methodology and a §tool for investigating the impact of interventions §on the multinomial distribution of acute outcomes §associated with alcohol misuse. The model is §calibrated by estimating conditional probabilities §based on actual experience. Interventions are then §modeled by adjusting conditional probabilities in §the directed graph.