Significantly better outcomes for MTC were found across four experimental versus control comparisons on 23.1% (12 of 52) of primary outcome measures of substance use, mental health, crime, HIV risk, employment, and housing.
Concurrent measures of substance use, mental health, social support, partnerships, and risk by the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) and clinical assessments were not significantly correlated.
In previous studies, the TLFB method demonstrated strong reliability and validity when compared to other measures of substance use (Fals-Stewart et al., 2000), including among homeless people (Sacks et al., 2003) and psychiatric outpatients (Carey, 1997).
Secondary outcomes include measures of substance use, depression and anxiety, quality of life, health care consumption and neuropsychological functions.
Where appropriate, outcome measures may include, in addition to measures of substance abuse, other measures of functioning (e.g., behavioral, social, etc).
18 19 Besides the measures of substance use, the confounders were selected from the conscription data, based on the scientific studies and earlier studies of this cohort.
We employed Wilcoxon signed rank test to compare median difference among two repeated measures of substance use among participants with drug use information collected more than once.
It is recommended that measures of substance use, including tobacco, be included routinely in future research studies and in clinical practice.
However, given that diagnostic or standardized measures of substance use were not routinely used at intake, enrollment in substance abuse treatment was considered to reflect substance abuse at a level that was impacting on daily functioning.
Although the validity and reliability of self-reports on substance use has been a subject of debate, previous research has concluded that, when anonymity is assured, self-report measures of substance use have acceptable validity and reliability [ 38, 39].
Importantly, the study was cross-sectional and it was not possible to establish the direction of causality between DLEs and the measures of substance use (we do not have information on the age-of-onset of the DLE).
