Lee Ann Kaskutas, Dr.P.H.

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Lee Ann Kaskutas, Dr.P.H.

Background Information and Areas of Research

Fields of Interest: Self-help groups, peer support, social networks, measuring alcohol consumption, drinking during pregnancy, and treatment outcome.

Lee Ann Kaskutas is a senior scientist at ARG and the center’s director of training.

Since starting at ARG in 1990, Kaskutas' overarching professional interest has been to find solutions to alcohol-related problems that do not require professionally-trained individuals for implementation. For example, she has conducted two NIH-funded clinical trials that compared the costs and outcomes of clinical and social model treatment programs. Currently, she is studying the long-term Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) "careers" of treated and untreated substance abusers and how their AA careers relate to abstinence. She also has developed a group-oriented, manual-guided intervention program designed to increase patient involvement with members of AA, and has conducted a trial to study its effectiveness. Another intervention co-designed by Kaskutas uses drinking glasses and bottles, and a companion computer program, to open dialogue with pregnant women regarding how much they drink.

In addition to regularly publishing peer-reviewed journal articles of studies funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Kaskutas supervises training of the field’s future leaders. An adjunct associate professor at U.C. Berkeley’s school of public health, she co-instructs the longstanding Advanced Alcohol Research Seminar. As ARG’s director of training, she also serves as principal investigator of the NIAAA-funded training grant Graduate Research Training on Alcohol Problems.

In spring 2008, Kaskutas received the Distinguished Academic Partner Award from the school of public health at the University of California. At last year’s American Society of Addiction Medicine Medical Scientific Conference, the society honored her with the 2007 R. Brinkley Smithers Distinguished Scientist Award for her contributions to the field of addiction medicine. She also received the Research Society on Alcoholism’s Young Investigator Award in 1998.

Lee Ann holds a doctorate in public health from the University of California at Berkeley.

Selected Publications

Kaskutas, Lee Ann (1993). Changes in public attitudes toward alcohol control policies since the warning label mandate of 1988. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 12(1): 30-37. (B555): Examines the policy finding that public support for warning labels has been the only alcohol control policy for which support has increased since the label legislation.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann & Graves, Karen. (1994). Relationship between cumulative exposure to health messages and awareness and behavior-related drinking during pregnancy. American Journal of Health Promotion 9(2), 115-124. (B602): Describes the relationship between levels of exposure to different sources of health messages regarding the risk of drinking during pregnancy, and respondents’ awareness and behavior related to this risk.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann. (1994). What do women get out of self help? Reasons for attending Women for Sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 11(3), 185-195. (B594): Considers reasons for distinct treatment approaches for women alcoholics and considers one such solution—Women for Sobriety—in depth.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann (1995). Interpretations of risk: the use of scientific information in the development of the alcohol warning label policy. The International Journal of the Addictions 30(12): 1519-1548. (B656): Critical analysis of the legislative process and research literature involved in the decision to require an alcohol warning label that pregnant women should not drink due to the risk of birth defects.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann; Weisner, Constance & Caetano, Raul. (1997). Predictors of help seeking among a longitudinal sample of the general population. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 58(2), 155-161. (B712): Using longitudinal data among drinkers interviewed in 1984 & followed up in 1992, considers types of treatment sought among those who went to treatment, contrasts those already treated by baseline to those newly treated at follow-up by demographics & problem measures.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann (1998). Hip and helpful: Alcoholics Anonymous in Marin County, California, pp.25-53. In: (Eisenbach-Stengl, I. and Rosenqvist, P., Eds.) Diversity in Unity: Studies of Alcoholics Anonymous in Eight Societies. Helsinki, Finland: Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research. (B608): Analyzes the membership and growth of Alcoholics Anonymous in Marin County. The attitudes of AA members toward alcohol problem prevention are also presented.

Kaskutas, L. A., Marsh, D. and Kohn, A. (1998) Didactic and experiential education in substance abuse programs. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 15, 43-54. (B755): Draws upon social learning and other theories from health education and community psychology to compare the didactic approach to education taken at the medical model study site with the experiential knowledge concept favored at the social model programs.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann. (2000). Understanding drinking during pregnancy among urban American Indians and African Americans: health messages, risk beliefs, and how we measure consumption. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 24, 1241-1250. (B885): This study found high levels of exposure to health warnings among all ethnic groups, but many women were unclear about the actual consequences of FAS, about the risk of drinking even beer or wine or wine coolers, or about the value of cutting down at any time during pregnancy. The majority of the women who drank malt liquor, fortified wine, wine and spirits reported having larger than standard drinks, and daily drinkers had the highest levels of reporting error.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann; and Graves, Karen (2000). An alternative to standard drinks as a measure of alcohol consumption. Journal of Substance Abuse 12: 67-78. (B888): Frequent drinkers, the majority of whom said to drink higher alcohol content beverages, reported drinking larger than standard sizes. This paper suggests that vessel models be used to help respondents define their own drink sizes instead of relying on standard sizes.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann; Bond, Jason; and Humphreys, Keith (2002). Social networks as mediators of the effect of Alcoholics Anonymous. Addiction 97(7): 891-900. (B929): This paper studies one of the mechanisms of action by which AA involvement leads to recovery.

Kaskutas, Lee Ann; Witbrodt, Jane; and French, Michael T. (2004). Outcomes and costs of day hospital treatment and nonmedical day treatment for chemical dependency. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 65(3): 371-382. (B997): Results demonstrate the diversity that exists in nonmedical, community-based day treatment programs, and they also show that nonmedical programs can be competitive with day hospital treatment in cost and most outcomes.

Grants and Subcontract Information


Graduate Research Training on Alcohol Problems, NIAAA T32 AA07240

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Last updating of page: August 15, 2006