Alcohol and alcoholism (Oxford, Oxfordshire). Supplement最新文献

Aims: To identify the pattern of gender differences in drinking across societies, and to its association with other societal characteristics.

Methods: The aggregated results of GENACIS project surveys in 29 countries were examined and were compared with other characteristics of these societies.

Results: In all the participating societies men's drinking was more prevalent and heavier than women's drinking. Differences between countries in the gender gap in drinking were strongly associated with women's position in society, as well as with modernization. Similar results were obtained for indicators of alcohol's adverse consequences.

Conclusions: Gender differences should be studied not only as individual behaviours, but also as societal traits, associated with other characteristics of the social system.

Aims: This study explored the suitability of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) for cross-national comparable estimates of problem drinking in general populations. On the item level the focus is on responsiveness to cross-national and gender differences. For the set of items the focus is on intercorrelations between items, indicating to what extent the AUDIT constitutes a scale.

Methods: General population surveys from nine European countries were included. Cross-tabulations were used to analyse cross-national and gender differences in scores on the items. Reliability analysis was used to analyse intercorrelations between the items.

Results: The items 'blackouts' (men and women) and 'guilt and remorse' (women) are the most frequently reported consequences. Gender differences tended to be smaller for 'guilt and remorse' and 'concern of others', and largest for 'morning drinking'. The reliability analysis shows that in eight of the nine countries frequency of drinking lowers the alpha. Injury and concern of others lead to a lower internal consistency in three countries.

Conclusions: There was sufficient variation between countries in the pattern of responses and variation in gender differences to conclude that the set of consequence items was responsive to national and gender differences in problem drinking. Frequency of drinking was not a good indicator of problem drinking. The country differences in item total correlations of consequences might be due to differences in how these items are interpreted. Decisions on which items to include in an instrument to allow comparison of estimates of problem drinking cross-nationally require studies on how these items are interpreted in general populations of different countries.

This paper provides an introduction to a series of articles reporting results from the EU concerted action "Gender, Culture and Alcohol Problems: A Multi-national Study" which examined differences in drinking among women and men in 13 European and two non-European countries. The gender gap in alcohol drinking is one of the few universal gender differences in human social behavior. However, the size of these differences varies greatly from one society to another. The papers in this issue examine, across countries, (1) men's and women's drinking patterns, (2) the prevalence of men's and women's experience of alcohol-related problems, (3) gender differences in social inequalities in alcohol use and abuse, (4) gender differences in the influence of combinations of social roles on heavy alcohol use, and (5) how societal-level factors predict women's and men's alcohol use and problems on a regional and global level. Country surveys were independently conducted and then centralized at one institution for further data standardization and processing. Several results indicated that the greater the societal gender equality in a country, the smaller the gender differences in drinking behavior. In most analyses the smallest gender differences in drinking behaviour were found in Nordic countries, followed by western and central European countries, with the largest gender differences in countries with developing economies.

Aims: To compare drinking habits and to examine differences between drinking cultures in different regions and countries in Europe; to examine gender differences in drinking habits and to compare them over countries.

Methods: Data consisted of independently conducted, centrally analysed surveys in the general population aged 20-64 years in 14 European countries. Central measures were abstention, frequency and volume of drinking overall and by beverage type, amounts drunk per drinking day, and heavy episodic drinking.

Results: There were clear gender differences in all drinking measures, except for wine drinking. Differences between genders were often smaller than average in northern Europe. Gender ratios did not show systematic changes by age, with the exception that young men and women differed less than older men and women in the frequency of heavy episodic drinking. The results on beverage preferences indicate that the distinction among wine/beer/spirits cultures have implicitly been based on male drinking. Our expectation was for more daily light drinking integrated in everyday life in the Mediterranean countries, more heavy episodic drinking associated with weekends and celebrations in the North, with the traditional beer countries somewhere in between. The differences observed were usually in the direction expected. However, no country represented an ideal type of drinking culture, i.e. drinking for 'mood-changing effects' only or for 'nutritional purposes' only; all countries were mixtures of these two extremes.

Conclusions: There were clear and consistent gender differences in all countries, while the differences in drinking between countries and regions were not as obvious.