{"doi":"10.1111/add.16735","title":"The need for multi‐participant alcohol administration studies","abstract":"Laboratory alcohol administration studies have largely neglected the social context in which drinking typically occurs. To advance our understanding of alcohol use and its associated harms, we need more multi-participant studies that examine alcohol's effects in social settings and how social contexts influence alcohol use. Since the 1930s, researchers have conducted alcohol administration studies to better understand individual differences in alcohol's effects on emotions, behavior and cognition that may explain underlying risk to develop alcohol use disorders (AUD) (e.g. [1]-[2]). Because the vast majority of alcohol use occurs in social settings (e.g. with friends/family, with unfamiliar others in bars/at parties) [3-5], we wondered how often laboratory alcohol administration studies included a social context. To answer this, we conducted a systematic review of laboratory alcohol administration studies published through 2023, searching three databases (PsycINFO, PubMed and Web of Science) for studies in which human participants consumed a fixed dose of alcohol. In total, 5690 records were screened for inclusion (see Figure 1). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed. Two independent judges coded each article for inclusion/exclusion and whether the laboratory drinking setting was solitary or social (see pre-registration for additional details https://osf.io/njvzd). Notably, as shown in Figure 1, of the 989 published alcohol administration studies we identified, 90.8% of them had participants consume alcohol alone in a solitary drinking setting. Less than 10% of studies featured a social context in which at least some of the participants interacted with at least one other participant or confederate during or after drinking alcohol. Importantly, in contrast to how alcohol is typically studied in the lab, outside of the lab, drinking most often occurs in the company of others. This is true for individuals across the lifespan (e.g. adolescents to older adults) and across the spectrum of alcohol use (e.g. light drinking to heavy and hazardous drinking) [3-5]. For instance, 86% of drinking occasions for a nationally representative sample of over 60 K British adults were in a social context [6]. Further, in nationally representative samples of United States (US) high school seniors, 75.5% of past-year alcohol use occurred ‘at a party’, [5] and three-fourths of seniors cited ‘to have a good time with friends’ as the primary motive for their alcohol use [7]. Even heavy drinking adults experiencing problems related to their alcohol consumption report drinking most often in social settings. For instance, in a large (n = 511) sample of US male veteran hazardous drinkers (mean age = 56 years), 73% of their past-week drinking occurred in social settings [8]. Even for the minority of individuals who report ever drinking alone, the majority of their drinking also occurs with others [3, 9]. As such, drinking alone is a very unusual way for individuals to experience alcohol. With respect to the 10% of laboratory studies that do incorporate social context, although 91 multi-participant alcohol administration studies may seem substantial, the vast majority of these studies had methodological limitations that make drawing firm conclusions difficult. Many of these studies were published before 1990, with more than half (55%) of all studies published two decades or more ago. Although the concept of statistical power has been recognized for much longer, it was not until Cohen's seminal work on power analysis was widely disseminated in the early 1990s [10] that consideration of sample size and adequate power became standard practice in research design. As such, with a median sample size of 54 participants and a mode of 40, the majority of these 91 multi-participant alcohol administration studies were underpowered to detect the small to moderate effect sizes established for alcohol (vs. con","journal":"Addiction","year":2024,"id":460641,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9528,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":289736,"name":"Catharine E. Fairbairn","orcid":"0000-0002-2694-5585","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":777978,"name":"Kasey G. Creswell","orcid":"0000-0002-6659-0651","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":21,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:04:07.925246Z","pmid":"39722489","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}