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The Impact Of Alcoholics Anonymous On Sobriety

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The Impact Of Alcoholics Anonymous On Sobriety
In this article, the researchers studied the impact of Alcoholics Anonymous on sobriety as well as the impact of gender differences and extroversion on success in AA. In Alcoholics Anonymous, women typically consist of one-third of the members (Krentzman, Brower, Cranford, Bradley, & Robinson, 2012). Some studies have also shown that women more frequently attend AA meetings and tend to be more extroverted (Krentzman et al., 2012). The researchers questioned if extroversion was a factor in women’s AA success as AA includes group fellowship and working with mentors, both activities that extroverts would be more comfortable doing than introverts. Previous studies have shown that being outgoing is associated with trying and staying in AA (Krentzman …show more content…
This supported the first part of their hypothesis. They also found that in their data, women were more likely to be extroverts than men and that 60.6% of women achieved one year of sobriety with AA, supporting their second hypothesis (Krentzman et al., 2012). However, this success in AA for women was not a function of extroversion. This disproved the third part of their hypothesis. By showing that extroversion was not a function of AA success, they found that both extroverted and introverted people could achieve sobriety with AA (Krentzman et al., 2012). This may be because introverts can act like extroverts or those individuals in AA have self-selected and are more motivated for change, overriding the extroversion trait (Krentzman et al., 2012). One problem with this study was that the data and sample were taken from another study that was not planned with this research question in mind. Therefore, the study design, survey conduction, and data collected are not specific to this study’s research. The results are positive as they show that both introverts and extroverts can be successful with AA, but further research could be done to find the reasons for this. Practically, these results can show the benefit of help from the support of Alcoholics Anonymous

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