Alcohol Outlets and Violence

在酒精预防和犯罪学文献的横断面地理研究中观察到，酒精销售点的位置与暴力犯罪事件（如袭击）发生率之间存在显著关联。最近，酒精预防研究人员和犯罪学家提出了评估零售和居住社区与犯罪率之间关系的互补模式。这些方法包括地质统计学方法，用于探索人和地方与暴力犯罪的空间关系，以及预测社区地区犯罪地点的理论方法。今天看来，酒精出口和暴力之间的生态联系并不是偶然的；这种关系在许多研究中得到了重复，出现在许多不同的地理水平上，并有强有力的理论支持。然而，目前对这种关系的研究受到限制，因为它们没有解决四个问题：(1)在分析模型中有限地使用理论相关的协变量，(2)使用有偏见的统计模型来分析地理数据，(3)对出口-暴力关系的错误说明，(4)缺乏纵向数据来评估时间有序的影响。目前的提案提出了处理这些问题的方法，并提出了从与犯罪潜力（即跨地理区域的犯罪概率）、逮捕和暴力袭击造成的伤害有关的理论模型中探索生态和个人期望的方法。本文提出了四项研究，分别考察了出口密度与暴力之间的时空关系（研究1），出口密度、犯罪潜力、零售市场和暴力之间的生态相关性（研究2），极端出口密度水平对饮酒行为、问题和攻击性规范的个人层面影响（研究3），以及与攻击相关的个人层面风险和保护因素（研究4）。该研究设计能够在很长一段时间（10年）内以及在加利福尼亚州的不同地区（例如，跨越1493个邮政编码地区）对这些影响进行检查。本研究的短期目标是阐明出口密度与攻击率变化的相关机制，并为探索环境特征（如出口密度）与个体攻击规范的关系建立经验基础。本研究的长期目标是为指导基于环境的酒精相关犯罪预防计划提供经验数据。

Significant associations between the locations of alcohol outlets and rates of violent criminal events such as assaults are observed in cross-sectional geographic studies in the alcohol prevention and criminology literature. Recently, alcohol prevention researchers and criminologists have advanced complementary modes of evaluating the relationships between retail and residential community areas and crime rates. These include geostatistical methods to explore the spatial relationships of people and places to violent crime and the theoretical approaches that predict the locations of crime in community areas. Today it appears that the ecological association between alcohol outlets and violence is not an accidental one; the relationship has been replicated in a number of studies, appears on a number of different geographic levels, and has strong theoretical support. Current studies of this relationship, however, are limited to the degree that they do not address four problems: (1) the limited use of theoretically relevant covariates in analysis models, (2) the use of biased statistical models for the analysis of geographic data, (3) a mis-specification of the outlet-violence relationship, (4) the absence of longitudinal data for the evaluation of temporally ordered effects. The current proposal suggests ways to deal with each of these issues and presents methods to explore ecological and individual expectations from theoretical models relating crime potentials (i.e., probabilities of crime across geographic areas) to arrests and injuries due to violent assaults. Four studies are proposed that examine the spatiotemporal relationships between outlet densities and violence (Study number 1), ecological correlations between outlet densities, crime potentials, retail markets and violence (Study number 2), the individual level effects of extreme levels of outlet densities on drinking behaviors, problems and aggressive norms (Study number 3), and individual level risk and protective factors related to assaults (Study number 4). The study designs enable the examination of these effects over long periods of time (10 years) and across vastly different areas of the state of California (e.g., across 1493 zip code areas). The short-term goals of this study are to clarify the mechanisms relating changes in outlet densities to assault rates and establish empirical bases for exploring the relationships of environmental characteristics (e.g., outlet densities) to individual norms for aggression. The long-term goal of this study is to provide empirical data to guide environmentally based alcohol-related crime prevention programs.