Dennis M. Gorman

Violent crime and alcohol availability: relationships in an urban community

The relationship between violent crime, neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, and alcohol outlet densities in Newark, New Jersey is reported, thus extending previous research of municipalities at more refined levels of analysis. Alcohol outlet densities were significant predictors in regression models, but rates of violent crime were better predicted in larger units (R2 = .673 for the census tract level vs. .543 at the census block group level). Alcohol outlet densities, however, were more predictive of violent crime at smaller units of analysis (change in R22 with the addition of alcohol outlet densities was .194 at the census tract level vs. .278 at the census block group level). Findings suggest that alcohol outlets represent a form of “undesirable land use” in urban neighborhoods that are a manifestation of increasingly concentrated economic disadvantage in the United States.

Risk of assaultive violence and alcohol availability in New Jersey.

OBJECTIVES This study examined the relationship between rate of assaultive violence and density of alcohol outlets in New Jersey. METHODS Data pertaining to assaultive violence, alcohol outlet density, and sociodemographic factors were obtained from municipalities in New Jersey (n = 223) and assessed through bivariate and multivariate analyses. RESULTS Sociodemographic factors accounted for 70% (R(2)=.70) of the variance in the rate of assaultive violence. Outlet density did not add significantly to the explained variance of this model. CONCLUSIONS In New Jersey, alcohol outlet density is not geographically associated with higher rates of violence. Alternative methodological and analytic techniques are required to better specify the relationship between alcohol availability and violence.

The Concentration of Liquor Outlets in an Economically Disadvantaged City in the Northeastern United States

This study reports data from a mapping analysis designed to assess the extent to which liquor outlets concentrate in certain neighborhoods within one economically disadvantaged midsized city in New Jersey. Four neighborhoods, which occupy one-quarter of the residential land mass of the city and which are home to one-quarter of its population, were found to contain over half of its retail liquor outlets. Three of these neighborhoods are very poor and have large minority populations. The neighborhood with the highest concentration of outlets, however, has one of the lowest levels of poverty in the city and is ethnically quite diverse.

Hierarchical Bayesian spatial models for alcohol availability, drug "hot spots" and violent crime

BackgroundEcologic studies have shown a relationship between alcohol outlet densities, illicit drug use and violence. The present study examined this relationship in the City of Houston, Texas, using a sample of 439 census tracts. Neighborhood sociostructural covariates, alcohol outlet density, drug crime density and violent crime data were collected for the year 2000, and analyzed using hierarchical Bayesian models. Model selection was accomplished by applying the Deviance Information Criterion.ResultsThe counts of violent crime in each census tract were modelled as having a conditional Poisson distribution. Four neighbourhood explanatory variables were identified using principal component analysis. The best fitted model was selected as the one considering both unstructured and spatial dependence random effects. The results showed that drug-law violation explained a greater amount of variance in violent crime rates than alcohol outlet densities. The relative risk for drug-law violation was 2.49 and that for alcohol outlet density was 1.16. Of the neighbourhood sociostructural covariates, males of age 15 to 24 showed an effect on violence, with a 16% decrease in relative risk for each increase the size of its standard deviation. Both unstructured heterogeneity random effect and spatial dependence need to be included in the model.ConclusionThe analysis presented suggests that activity around illicit drug markets is more strongly associated with violent crime than is alcohol outlet density. Unique among the ecological studies in this field, the present study not only shows the direction and magnitude of impact of neighbourhood sociostructural covariates as well as alcohol and illicit drug activities in a neighbourhood, it also reveals the importance of applying hierarchical Bayesian models in this research field as both spatial dependence and heterogeneity random effects need to be considered simultaneously.

Drinking as an Epidemic—A Simple Mathematical Model with Recovery and Relapse

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a simple mathematical model of drinking lapse. Problem drinking is modeled as an acquired state - the result of frequent or intense interactions among individuals in three drinking states within a specified drinking environment. The goal of the model is to identify mechanisms that facilitate or limit the conversion of a population of nondrinkers to one of drinkers within prespecified environments. The process of quantification helps to understand the role of social forces on the time evolution of drinking. The dynamics of the model support two distinct states. The nature of these distinct outcomes depends in general on the size of the initial proportion of drinkers, the overall average residence time in the drinking environment, and the intensity of the interactions between problem drinkers and the rest of the residents. Numerical simulations are used to illustrate the model results on drinking dynamics. It is found that the most general model can support two permanent prevalent states when treatment only has short-term effect and relapse rates are high.

Alcohol Availability and Domestic Violence

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among sociodemographic variables, alcohol outlet density, and rate of domestic violence in New Jersey. Data were obtained for the 223 largest municipalities in the state and were examined using factor analysis and bivariate and multivariate analyses. Three sociodemographic factors were extracted through factor analysis. These explained 58% of the variance among municipalities in rates of domestic violence. One factor--termed social disadvantage--explained the greatest amount of unique variance (42%). Alcohol outlet density added nothing to the sociodemographic model and did not interact with any of the three sociodemographic factors. The findings show that, in the state of New Jersey, higher levels of alcohol outlet density are not geographically associated with higher rates of domestic violence. These findings may be due to limitations in the data sets employed in the study, limitations of the macrolevel analysis employed, and/or the complex nature of the relationship between alcohol use and domestic violence.

Do School-Based Social Skills Training Programs Prevent Alcohol Use Among Young People?

School-based social skills training programs are among the most popular form of alcohol misuse prevention strategies employed in the USA. This paper reviews published evaluations of this strategy, in an attempt to assess consistency of findings across studies. The majority of studies show that social skills training programs, while not detrimental, have little or no impact upon participants in terms of their alcohol use behavior. Reasons why such programs are ineffective are discussed, and suggestions made concerning the direction of future primary prevention research.

Implications of systems dynamic models and control theory for environmental approaches to the prevention of alcohol- and other drug use-related problems

The approach described in this article is premised on the idea that drug and alcohol use-related problems are heterogeneously distributed with respect to population and geography, and therefore, are essentially local problems. More specifically, it is argued that viewing a local community as an interacting set of systems that support or buffer the occurrence of specific substance misuse outcomes, opens up to research two important prospects. The first of these involves creating adequate systems models that can capture the primary community structures and relationships that support public health problems such as alcohol and drug misuse and related outcomes. The second entails rationally testing control strategies that have the potential to moderate or reduce these problems. Understanding and controlling complex dynamic systems models nowadays pervades all scientific disciplines, and it is to research in areas such as biology, ecology, engineering, computer sciences, and mathematics that researchers in the field of addictions must turn to in order to better study the complexity that confronts them as they try to understand and prevent problems resulting from alcohol and drug use and misuse. Here we set out what such a systems-based understanding of alcohol- and drug use-related problems will require and discuss its implications for public policy and prevention programming.

Etiological Theories and the Primary Prevention of Drug Use

Since the early 1980s, the social influence model has dominated the field of primary prevention research. Social influence programs generally take the form of standardized curricula, aimed at all members of broadly defined target populations. Evaluative research has employed a fundamentally inductive methodology, the goal of which is to generate successive “confirming instances” of program effectiveness among these broad populations. As a result, prevention research has largely stagnated, and has not availed itself of recent findings from basic research such as those reported in this issue. This research tells us that the relationship between peer group affiliation and drug use is reciprocal and not unidirectional as assumed in most social influence programs, that the scope of intervention efforts must be broadened because the processes involved in the initiation of drug use are far more complex than suggested by the theories on which current prevention efforts are based, and that programs should be targeted rather than universal as some individuals are at greater risk of developing a problem with drugs than others.

Defining and operationalizing 'research-based' prevention: a critique (with case studies) of the US Department of Education's Safe, Disciplined and Drug-Free Schools Exemplary Programs

Abstract ‘Science-based’ and ‘research-based’ are terms that have increasingly been applied to school drug and violence prevention programs over the past 5 years. The US Department of Education recently produced a list of research-based drug and violence prevention programs, which conferred ‘Exemplary’ status on nine programs. According to the criteria used to define Exemplary, there must be at least one evaluation that has demonstrated an effect on a behavioral outcome, and this evidence must come from a methodologically sound evaluation. This paper discusses these criteria through an examination of two evaluations of school-based programs that were conferred Exemplary status—the Second Step curriculum and the Adolescent Training and Learning to Avoid Steroids (ATLAS) program. The preponderance of evidence reported in each evaluation shows that the programs had little or no effect on behavioral outcomes. Also, both evaluations have methodological flaws, especially with regard to recruitment and retention of participants. These findings suggest that the Exemplary criteria were either poorly defined or not well operationalized in the process of program selection.