GEOGRAPHY OF AVAILABILITY AND ALCOHOL PROBLEMS

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DESCRIPTION: Local and state efforts by community leaders and state lawmakers to formulate alcohol policy have proceeded in the absence of a clear understanding of the mechanisms by which alcohol availability produces problematic outcomes. In order to understand these mechanisms, one must consider the ways in which individual drinkers consume alcohol in different locations with different associated risks and the ways in which these individual patterns of use are manifested in community settings. Thus, the physical arrangement of drinking locations in space and time, the location of bars and restaurants in a community, and the homes in which drinkers consume alcohol, all help determine the geographic patterning of alcohol-related problems. Significantly, the geographic distribution of these problems (e.g., drinking and driving) affects drinkers and nondrinkers alike. Thus, the geography of drinking patterns and the geography of drinking problems become public health concerns of broad interest to community policy makers. In order to make the link between drinking patterns, drinking activities and locations of drinking problems one must study the geography of drinking places. Applying recent methodological advances in the analysis of geographic data, the current research will examine geographic links between availability, use and problems in community contexts. The proposed three year project will test a series of hypotheses regarding the relationships between the geography of availability and a small set of drinking problems; alcohol-related crashes, pedestrian injuries, and youth access to alcohol. The proposed research will: (1) test for expected geographic relationships between availability, use, and problems at the community level; (2) examine the relationships between availability and drinking problems at the city level; and (3) develop and apply the technology for estimating local incidence and prevalence rates for alcohol-related problems. The short term goals of the project are to test some of the expected geographic relationships between availability, use and problems and further develop applications of geostatistical methods to the analysis of communitybased geographic data. The long term goals of the project are to elucidate availability-use problem links using geographic data and to develop geographic systems for the targeting of preventive health services, whether these services be characterized in terms of enforcement, education or controls over the of availability.