Short communicationDrinking and heavy drinking by students in 18 countries
Introduction
Many studies have described the dangers of heavy alcohol consumption by students. During the past few decades, numerous surveys have been made of drinking among different student groups. Many of these studies have been conducted in North America but in the past few years, studies have also been made in European and Latin American countries. Recently, a study was made in a number of European countries of drinking among students using a standardized methodology (Hibell et al., 1997). However, there was no analysis of how drinking levels and drinking patterns relate to each other and no analysis of how they correlate with overall levels of alcohol consumption in the country as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to compile and analyze data on students drinking habits and to see how they relate to total per capita alcohol consumption rates for the country.
International studies of alcohol use are interesting for many reasons. Alcohol is an international commodity and the largest producers of alcoholic drinks are involved in markets in many countries. Also, international trends in alcohol consumption have been noted, such as the trend towards globalization in beverage preferences (Edwards et al., 1994). However, no comparisons of student alcohol use in different countries have been made. Such comparisons can show how different behaviors, e.g. daily drinking and binge drinking, are related. In addition, comparisons can be made of drinking levels among students and in a country as a whole using per capita alcohol consumption figures. This should gives some indication of whether the highest levels of student drinking and heavy drinking occur in countries where drinking levels are generally high. It also allows the possibility of finding clusters of countries where drinking habits are the same among students. This should give some indications for preventive programs on alcohol problems among students.
There are very few studies that examine how well per capita alcohol consumption figures relate to survey data on drinking patterns. Fitzgerald and Mulford (1993) observed that, from 1985 to 1989 in Iowa, per capita consumption declined, at the same time general population surveys showed that drinking frequency also declined in most drinking contexts. However, drinking at home and drinking alone increased, as did troubles and illness due to drinking. Smith et al. (1990) analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for 21 US states. They found that per capita consumption from sales correlated 0.81 with self-reported consumption, 0.74 with heavy drinking, and 0.51 with binge drinking. We have been unable to find any studies that examine relationships among per capita alcohol consumption data from sales and survey-derived patterns of alcohol consumption among students. This paper examines how many student alcohol use studies have been published, how levels of drinking, daily drinking and heavy drinking are correlated and whether student alcohol use correlated with per capita alcohol consumption in the country as a whole.
Section snippets
Method
A literature review of high school alcohol use surveys was done using the library resources of the Addiction Research Foundation (ARF). This included a search using Medline, ETOH and the ARF library file system. Several hundred papers were found fitting some of the criteria, however, almost all were studies from the USA and Canada. Many were based on small samples, students other than those in high school, or did not cover the alcohol use patterns required here. However, comparable data on high
Results
Data on student drinking in the 18 countries are shown in Table 1. The order in which data are presented in this table reflects a classification scheme described below. The table shows that there are wide variations in all measure of student drinking patterns across countries. In some countries (those in group 1) less than 10% of student report drinking six or more times in this last month, but in other countries (those in group 2) over 19% report drinking this often. The range for the
Discussion
The results of the analyses of student drinking data from 18 countries show wide variations in patterns of consumption such as daily drinking and drunkenness. These patterns did not vary for the three groups of countries — high, medium and low in terms of per capita consumption. However, per capita consumption overall was related to the proportion of students who were drinking in the past 12 months and with the percentage of students who reported drinking at least six times in the past month.
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