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Research into therapeutic interventions and the efficacy of treatment services considers only "clock time" - that is, "time" as a technical, "objective" consideration. This is the first study to apply the concept of "social time" to the inpatient treatment of addiction in alcohol and drug clinics in Switzerland. It is based on an extensive pilot study which has shown that treatment optimism and other variables are relevant to treatment and correlated with general concepts of time (e.g. "future orientation") as well as with styles of time-use during treatment (e.g. "killing time"). Specifically, it addresses the following questions:
- Do alcohol and drug users have shorter time-horizons and share less dynamic images of "time" than control groups? Do drug users do so even more than alcohol users?
- Do conflicting time-concepts of patients and staff and the management of "private" and "public time" in alcohol and drug clinics influence treatment outcome in general and drop-out rates in particular? (hypothesis of the sup-optimal matching of "social time" and "clock time")
- What is the relationship between general future orientation, self-efficacy and stages of change in recovering from addiction?
- Do individual time budgets prior to treatment, such as living on the street, being homeless and having served time in prison, influence strategies of time use (e.g. "killing time" or "waiting") and time reckoning in inpatient treatment?
- Are health status (e.g. HIV infection; chronic use of alcohol or drugs), age, ethnicity, predictors of expected time needed for change?
- How do subjective speed of time and time dynamics vary among patients with the same objective time in treatment?