Multimedia Training for Families in Alcoholism Recovery

The project's goal is to reduce the rate of relapse among recovering alcoholics and to interruptthe family transmission of alcoholism by training alcoholism treatment professionals in the role thatfamily dynamics plays in supporting the recovering alcoholic's journey to ongoing sobriety. Acomputer-driven, laserdisc-based training program will be developed to achieve this goal during PhaseII. The program will be based on and will accompany a print curriculum, Maintaining AbstinencePrograms (MAPS), developed at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California. The finalproduct will be designed so that it can be used as 1) a curriculum-specific training tool, 2) as aprofessional education tool providing an introduction to family recovery issues, and 3) as a supplementa-ry source of audio-visual material to enhance the curriculum itself. During Phase I, staff will analyze theprint curriculum; review videotaped research interviews on which it is based, create an instructionaldesign, and develop and field-test a prototype product. These tasks will demonstrate the feasibility ofdeveloping a full-scale, multimedia training program that will innovatively apply video and computertechnologies to the alcohol treatment and recovery field for purchase by alcohol treatment programs andfacilities.