| Methods |
Randomised controlled trial. |
| Participants |
Bars and restaurants in one US city. |
| Interventions |
A training programme for owners/managers of alcohol establishments, Alcohol Risk Management (ARM), comprising 4 sessions of 1‐2 hours each. Control group later received ‘ARM Express’, 1 session of 2 hours. |
| Outcomes |
Sales rates to ‘intoxicated’ actors making purchase attempts |
| Notes |
Data also collected on adoption by establishments of policies from a recommended list of 18 but this is not within the inclusion criteria specified in our review. |
| Risk of bias |
| Bias |
Authors' judgement |
Support for judgement |
| Adequate sequence generation? |
Low risk |
From establishments listed by state and city licensing agencies, contact was made until number agreeing to participate had reached the researchers ‘participation goal'. 231 agreed to participate. Assigned to intervention or control using a random numbers table. |
| Allocation concealment? |
Unclear risk |
No information. |
| Blinding?
All outcomes |
Unclear risk |
No information. |
| Confounders |
Low risk |
No details provided of any differences between intervention and control groups. |
| Data collection methods |
Unclear risk |
Observed server behaviour with 'intoxicated' actors. |
| Withdrawals & dropouts |
Low risk |
Data analysed stated to have come from all 122 (intervention) and 109 (control) establishments |
| Intervention integrity |
High risk |
104/122 intervention and 31/109 controls completed training. |
| Duration of follow‐up |
Unclear risk |
Two follow‐ups. First approx 1 month after training completed. Second approx 3 months after training completed. |
