Did you all notice an ad over there on the right asking for your help with a survey? Well, I wanted to tell you a little more about it. A couple of weeks ago a PhD student decided to advertise here on L&M to seek participants to fill out an anonymous study related to marriages and alcohol, for his dissertation. He thought this would be a great place to find a variety of married couples interested in helping and being entered into a raffle for one of four $50 Target gift cards.
The basics of his research are this:
-There are a variety of great treatments available for alcohol use issues (ranging from websites to books to therapy), but they are vastly underutilized because many people do not seek help for their drinking until something drastic happens.
-In married couples, your partner is typically your biggest source of support (both positive support such as encouragement and negative support such as nagging), and so they likely play a major role in your decision to make changes in your alcohol use.
– I am interested in looking at a range of couples, including both heavier and lighter drinkers, because even one drink can cause a disagreement in a marriage depending on the couples’ personal circumstances.
-Overall, I hope to create a model that helps us to describe how one’s partner plays a role (again, positively or negatively) in encouraging a person to seek help for alcohol use issues, so that we can better understand and utilize that relationship.
I’d love to be able to help him in his efforts and also provide you all with an easy way to get a little extra Target cash in your pocket. If you have some spare time, you can click here and fill out this survey, it should take you about twenty minutes. Remember, it’s totally anonymous!

Liz is a just a mom trying to keep it real about how little she sleeps, how often she gets puked on and how much she loves them. You can find her here every day writing about real-mom moments.
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