Alcohol research news: identifying drunkenness in the NTE; alcohol and violence

Identifying drunkenness in the night-time economy

• Background: Prohibiting the sale of alcohol to intoxicated patrons by licensees and their staff requires definitions of drunkenness.
• Aims: To assess the relationship between blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and indicators used in field sobriety tests putatively associated with intoxication.
• Design, participants, setting, material and methods: A random sample of 314 female and 579 male city centre drinkers. Surveyors scored respondents' and non-respondents' gait, eyes and speech for signs of drunkenness as well as their drunkenness on a 10-point Likert scale. Breath analysis was used to determine respondents' BAC.
• Findings: Combinations of slurred speech, staggering gait and glazed eyes significantly predicted levels of BAC with a staggering gait indicating highest levels of intoxication.
• Conclusions: Subjective ratings of drunkenness by trained observers corresponded with BAC. Transition BACs denoting observable behaviour change associated with intoxication have been identified. Observations of gait, combined with assessment of slurred speech should be the basis of estimates of drunkenness.

Nick Perham, Simon C. Moore, Jonathan Shepherd, Bryany Cusens (2007) Identifying drunkenness in the night-time economy Addiction 102 (3), 377–380. Hear more about this research from Simon Moore on a forthcoming Alcohol Policy UK podcast

Alcohol and violence: use of possible confounders in a time-series analysis

• Aims: To assess the aggregate association between alcohol consumption and violence, while controlling for potential confounders.
• Design and measurements: The data comprise aggregate time-series for Norway in the period 1880–2003 and 1911–2003 on criminal violence rates and per capita alcohol consumption. Possible confounders comprise annual rates of unemployment, divorce, marriage, total fertility rate, gross national product, public assistance/social care and the proportion of the population aged between 15 and 25. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) analyses were performed on differenced data. Both semilogarithmic and linear models were estimated.
• Findings: Alcohol consumption was associated significantly with violence, and an increase in alcohol consumption of 1 litre per year per inhabitant predicted a change of approximately 8% in the violence rate. The parameter estimate for the alcohol variable remained unaltered after including the covariates both in the semilogarithmic and the linear models. Of the seven covariates included in the models, only divorce was associated significantly with violence rate.
• Conclusions: The results suggest that alcohol consumption has an independent effect on violence rates when other factors are controlled for. The results support the assumption of a causal effect of alcohol consumption on violence, and it appears that alcohol consumption is an important factor when we wish to explain changes in violence rates over time.

Elin K. Bye, Alcohol and violence: use of possible confounders in a time-series analysis, Addiction, Vol. 102 Issue 3 Page 369

Contributor: Libby Ranzetta Alcohol Policy UK February 17, 2007