This is a study of the credibility of general population drinking surveys and of the Single Distribution Alcoholism Prevention Model. The long term objective is more accurate specification of what drinking behavior and related health and other problems occur under what specified conditions and more accurate selection and targeting of alcoholism prevention strategies. The study seeks to discover how much of the well documented gap between the officially reported volume of beverage alcohol sold in a population and the amount consumed estimated from the self-reports of a sample of the population is attributable to: a) atypical heavy drinking occasions unmeasured in past surveys, b) drinking by adolescents - also missing from general population surveys, and c) denial by heavy drinkers. The study also tests the """"""""lag hypothesis"""""""" from the Single Distribution Model that if an increase in per-capita alcohol consumption is due mainly to the influx of new drinkers, then an increase in alcoholism rates will lag the consumption growth by several years. A sample of Iowa adults, a sample of the adolescents age 14-17 and a sample of persons arrested for drunk driving will be interviewed in early 1985. To determine how much each of the new measures - atypical heavy drinking and adolescent drinking - contributes to narrowing the gap, the gap sizes obtained with, and without, each of the new measures will be compared. To determine how much heavy drinker denial might contribute to the gap, the responses of the drunk driver arrestees to questions about their recent drinking (and driving) behavior will be checked against documentation resulting from their arrest. The lag hypothesis will be tested by analyzing trends in per-capita alcohol sales related to trends in liver cirrhosis mortality rates and several survey self-report indicators of problem drinking in 1985 - some 15 years following an influx of new drinkers in the state.
| Mulford, H A; Fitzgerald, J L (1988) Per capita alcohol sales, heavy drinker prevalence and alcohol problems in Iowa for 1958-1985. Br J Addict 83:265-8 |
| Fitzgerald, J L; Mulford, H A (1987) Self-report validity issues. J Stud Alcohol 48:207-11 |
