Alcohol Outlets and Violence

在酒精预防和犯罪学文献中的横断面地理研究中发现，酒精销售点的位置与暴力犯罪事件(如袭击)的发生率之间存在显著的关联。最近，酒精预防研究人员和犯罪学家提出了评估零售和住宅社区区域与犯罪率之间关系的互补模式。这些方法包括探索人和地点与暴力犯罪的空间关系的地统计学方法，以及预测社区地区犯罪地点的理论方法。如今，饮酒渠道和暴力之间的生态关联似乎不是偶然的；这种关系在许多研究中得到了重复，出现在一些不同的地理水平上，并有强有力的理论支持。然而，目前对这种关系的研究在一定程度上没有解决四个问题：(1)在分析模型中有限地使用理论上相关的协变量，(2)使用有偏见的统计模型来分析地理数据，(3)错误地说明出口-暴力关系，(4)缺乏用于评估时间有序影响的纵向数据。目前的提案提出了处理每一个问题的方法，并提出了从理论模型探讨生态和个人期望的方法，这些模型将犯罪潜力(即跨地理区域的犯罪概率)与暴力袭击造成的逮捕和伤害联系起来。本研究拟进行四项研究，分别探讨出口密度与暴力的时空关系(研究1)、出口密度、犯罪潜力、零售市场与暴力之间的生态关系(研究2)、出口密度极端水平对饮酒行为、问题和攻击规范的个体水平影响(研究3)、以及与攻击相关的个体水平风险和保护因素(研究4)。研究设计能够在很长一段时间内(10年)和加利福尼亚州非常不同的地区(例如，1493个邮政编码地区)检查这些影响。这项研究的短期目标是阐明出口密度变化与攻击率之间的关系，并为探索环境特征(例如出口密度)与个体攻击规范之间的关系奠定经验基础。这项研究的长期目标是提供经验数据，以指导基于环境的酒精相关犯罪预防计划。

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.