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The Project for Matching Alcoholism Treatments to Client Heterogeneity (Project MATCH), organized by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), was a large-scale multisite clinical trial. This project aimed to test the general assumption that matching patients by their characteristics to particular treatment modalities would improve treatment outcomes. According to this hypothesis, patients who received treatment matched to their characteristics were predicted to be more likely to have better treatment outcomes compared with patients who were not matched or who were mismatched. Such assumptions of treatment matching effects, though long held, had not been stringently tested in a large and representative study prior to the development and implementation of Project MATCH. In the design of this study, a team of researchers devised specific hypotheses of patient-treatment interactions. Hypotheses were based on previous research findings and theoretical considerations that suggested how patient characteristics were related to treatment outcomes for alcohol problems. This study represented an important clinical trial that aimed to evaluate the utility of matching patients to treatment, and thus has yielded specific and broad-based clinical implications within the field of alcohol treatment outcome research, as well as psychotherapy research in general.

General Information about Project Match

To date, Project MATCH is the largest and most statistically powerful trial of psychotherapies undertaken. This study involved 1,726 patients, 22 principal investigators, 80 therapists, 9 communities containing 30 participating institutions and agencies, and many support staff. It was carried out over an 8-year period and was estimated to cost $27 million to implement.

Treatment within Project MATCH was conducted with clients recruited from two different settings. These included outpatient settings (N = 952), as well as patients receiving follow-up treatment subsequent to 3-month-long inpatient care (N = 774). From each of these two setting types, patients underwent identical procedures for randomization, assessment, and treatment. These patients will hereafter be referred to as outpatients and aftercare patients, respectively.

All patients were randomly assigned to one of three manual-guided treatment conditions, which were selected on the basis of previously demonstrated efficacy, as well as treatment distinctiveness that would potentially reveal matching effects. All treatment modalities were administered in an individual therapy format and were 12 weeks in duration.

The first treatment modality was a 12-session Twelve-Step Facilitation therapy (TSF), based on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) principles. The stated objectives in TSF were to foster acceptance of alcoholism as a medical disease and to garner commitment to participate in AA following the TSF The second treatment modality was Cognitive Behavioral Coping Skills therapy (CBT). The CBT approach, also consisting of 12 sessions, was based on social learning theory principles that are designed to teach skills that target the avoidance of relapse. Finally, Motivational Enhancement Therapy (MET) was tested. MET is based on principles of motivational psychology that help patients to utilize personal resources to make changes. MET conducted within Project MATCH involved four sessions that were spaced over a 12-week period. Twenty-five percent of sessions from each treatment modality were monitored for quality control and adherence to the respective manual.

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