Drinking context and alcohol’s harm from others among men and women in the 2010 US National Alcohol Survey

Abstract

Background Little is known about how drinking in different contexts is associated with harms from someone else’s drinking, including marital problems, financial problems, and assault. We examined how drinking in four different contexts was associated with alcohol’s harm from others (AHFO). Methods We utilized the landline sample of the 2010 US National Alcohol Survey (n = 5,885) to examine associations between drinking context and AHFO using weighted binary logistic regression. Results For women, drinking when friends dropped over was positively associated with assault and financial troubles due to someone else’s drinking. Drinking when friends dropped over was negatively associated with assault for men. For men, drinking at a bar, party, or during a quiet evening at home were each significantly associated with more assault by someone who had been drinking. Bar drinking among women was significantly associated with more marital problems, whereas drinking at a party at someone else’s home was associated with significantly less marital problems. Conclusions Context-specific drinking has differential associations with specific types of harms from someone else’s drinking for men and women. Additional research on drinking context, relationship to the harmer, and violence experienced by men and women is needed.

The social location of harm from others’ drinking in 10 societies

“…Further studies could examine the contribution of exposure to high‐risk venues to harms from strangers, as prior work in some countries suggests that frequent drinking in bars or at parties increases the risk of violent interactions with other drinkers (e.g. ).…”

Alcohol’s Secondhand Harms in the United States: New Data on Prevalence and Risk Factors

“…As with heavy drinking, AHTO occur in a socioecological context (Freisthler et al, 2008). Individual-level characteristics, such as gender and income, interact with drinking context (Kaplan et al, 2017a) and neighborhood conditions (Karriker-Jaffe & Greenfield, 2014) to influence exposure to harm from others' drinking.…”

The Relationship Between the U.S. State Alcohol Policy Environment and Individuals’ Experience of Secondhand Effects: Alcohol Harms Due to Others’ Drinking

“…Yet heavy consumption and binge drinking adversely affect not only the drinker, but also other people around the drinker, with harms to these collaterals (alcohol's secondhand effects or externalities) remaining understudied (Greenfield et al., ), especially in the United States. However, work on secondhand harms in the United States has recently intensified, supported by grants on alcohol's harms to others (AHTO) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) (Greenfield et al., ; Kaplan et al., ). Our team has previously found evidence that experiencing secondhand harms of others’ drinking is associated with individual's support for strengthening alcohol controls (Greenfield et al., , ; Karriker‐Jaffe et al., ).…”

“…We reasoned that since it has been shown that similarly lagged APS scores are associated with state binge drinking prevalence (Naimi et al., ) and individuals’ binge drinking (Xuan et al., ), it is likely that the lagged APS measures would also predict experiences of AHTO, which generally are believed to involve heavy drinking by others. In this collaborative study, as in prior work, our models controlled for a range of individual covariates, including the victim's demographic characteristics often been found to be associated with exposures to harms from other drinkers (Fillmore, ; Greenfield et al., ; Kaplan et al., ; Karriker‐Jaffe et al., ) and especially age‐group (Nayak et al., in press). We included 1 state‐level variable—per capita extent of policing in a given state jurisdiction (taken as an exogenous measure of overall law enforcement).…”