Reducing heavy drinking in college males with the decisional balance: Analyzing an element of motivational interviewing

The decisional balance, a brief detailing of the advantages and disadvantages of behavior change, serves as a key component to interventions in Motivational Interviewing. The impact of this component alone is not well understood. Forty-seven men completed a Timeline Followback interview assessing alcohol consumption and unsafe sexual practices. They then completed a decisional balance, listing the Pros and Cons of decreasing their drinking, but not one for safer sex. One-month follow-up data showed that they had statistically significant and clinically meaningful increases in their motivation to alter drinking and decreases in the number of drinks that they intended to drink, the actual drinks consumed per month, the days per month that they drank, their maximum number of drinks consumed on one occasion, and their average number of drinks per occasion. They did not alter their sexual behavior or their motivation to increase safe sex behavior. These results suggest that the decisional balance plays an important role in Motivational Interviewing and could serve as a quick and efficient intervention by itself.