Citation

Norstrom T. Addiction 1998; 93(10): 1531-1538.

Affiliation

Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Sweden.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9926557

Abstract

AIM: To assess the value of using indicators of alcohol-related harm to estimate changes in unrecorded per capita consumption of alcohol. DESIGN: Unrecorded consumption was estimated from the discrepancy between the observed changes in a number of alcohol-related harm indicators and the changes that would be expected from changes in recorded consumption. The results were compared with estimates of unrecorded consumption from survey data. MEASUREMENTS: Four indicators of alcohol-related harm were used: alcohol-related mortality, assaults, drunken driving, and suicide. Estimates of unrecorded consumption from survey data for five different years were used as benchmarks. FINDINGS: The best performing indicators were alcohol-related mortality, suicide and assaults, in that order. Combining these indicators yielded a prediction error averaging 12% in comparison with the benchmarks. CONCLUSIONS: The method seems worthy of further applications, but it should be regarded as a supplement rather than as a substitute for other approaches.

Language: en