Complex systems modelling of alcohol consumption dynamics in the British population

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Excessive alcohol consumption (drinking the equivalent, roughly, of more than 2 bottles of wine every week, or more than 4 pints of beer in a single evening) is associated with a variety of harmful outcomes, to both individuals and to society. For example, people who are drunk have a higher risk of committing criminal damage, leading to victim distress, costs to the criminal justice system, and increased insurance premiums. As a result of these harmful outcomes, governments tend to want to reduce the levels of excessive drinking in society. However, in order to be confident of taking the most appropriate action, governments need to know about how alcohol consumption is changing across society, and to understand the underlying factors that are responsible for these changes. In Britain, most of the knowledge about levels of drinking comes from surveys. In most years since 1978, the residents of about 10,000 British households have been asked about their drinking behaviour. The actual households involved change every year. The surveys allow us to estimate, for example, what proportion of women aged 18-to-24 years old are drinking excessively each year. Until recently, the surveys suggested that this proportion had stayed relatively unchanged over time: the proportion of 18-to-24 year old women who drank excessively in 1988 was similar to the proportion who drank excessively in 1978, and as both groups of women got older the proportion of them who drank to excess reduced. However, over more recent surveys, the proportion of 18-to-24 year old women who drink excessively has been rising toward the proportion of excessive male drinkers in this same age group. Whilst there has been some speculation as to why this change might have happened (for example, women staying single for longer, or perceptions of increased acceptability of female drinking, or the increased availability of alcohol in supermarkets), nobody has explored these reasons scientifically or attempted to quantify what might happen next. This project aims to address the issue of why alcohol consumption is changing over time (as in the example above) using a set of ideas and mathematical tools from an academic discipline known as complex systems modelling. It will look for patterns in the survey data, and to see if these patterns are changing over time (for example, were the sort of people who were drinking excessively in 2010 the same sort of people who were drinking excessively in 1980?). It will link these patterns to wider changes and events in society (for example, the point at which supermarkets were allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays), using methods from the discipline of economics, to identify which factors might be important. These findings will then be used to explore in detail the changes in drinking behaviour by specific groups in society. The project will combine knowledge from the academic disciplines of sociology and social psychology with survey data on groups of people born in 1958 and 1970 (whose drinking has been followed over time) to see if the drinking behaviour we see in Britain as a whole can be explained by what is happening to individual people's drinking-related attitudes, intentions and behaviours as they interact with each other and grow older. The project's findings will help inform the future actions that governments may take when trying to reduce levels of excessive alcohol consumption in society.