Study title

This study charted Finnish community sanctions clients' situation in life and alcohol and drug use. Main themes included the problems that arose from the respondents' substance use, their motivation to stop using substances, and their use of social services. Additionally, the data include evaluations of client meeting discussions between community sanctions office employees and clients. The data were collected as part of a research project on the adherence of motivational interviewing in the initial substance abuse setting and its effect on clients' substance abuse harm reduction (the MISA project), funded by the Academy of Finland, Criminal Sanctions Agency and Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies. The data consist of a pre-treatment survey, evaluations of counselling session discussions by both the counsellor and the client, post-treatment surveys, and background information surveys for both the client and the employee. The pre-treatment survey, evaluations and background information surveys were completed during the counselling sessions, and the post-treatment surveys were completed as phone interviews six and twelve months after treatment. This dataset can be connected to the qualitative dataset FSD3370 Substance Abuse Treatment in Community Sanctions Offices: Client Meetings 2007-2009, which consists of transcriptions of the counselling session discussions. The respondents in the two datasets can be connected with a unique client number. The qualitative dataset is only available in Finnish. The pre- and post-treatment surveys were nearly identical. First, the clients' situation in life and use of alcohol in the past six months were surveyed with questions from the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). The questions focused on, for example, how often the respondents consumed alcohol, how often they had not been able to stop drinking once they had started, how often they had felt guilt or remorse after drinking, and whether they had felt that...