The contribution of drinking patterns to the relative risk of injury in six communities: A self-report based probability approach

Objective: This article reports the results of an analysis of the relationships between demographic and alcohol consumption variables and the likelihood of injury occurring during the 6-month period prior to survey administration. Method: The data examined are from a general population survey administered to 22,626 respondents (56.9% female) as part of a community trial project to reduce alcohol-involved injury currently being conducted in six communities in California and South Carolina. Three models that relate consumption patterns and exogenous background variables to injury are evaluated. The first considers only demographic background variables. The second model adds three consumption measures (i.e., frequency, average drinks per occasion and variance) to the first. The third adds a control for community of residence. A fourth model is estimated using frequency and average drinks per occasion, by omitting variance. Results: Findings indicate that likelihood of injury is affected by demographic, alcohol consumption and community of residence variables. Specifically, likelihood of injury is significantly related to being young, white, male and single, and having a high variance drinking pattern. Community level effects were found, with California respondents being more likely to experience injuries, controlling for other model variables. Although measures for education and income were included in our analysis, no effects for these variables could be found. Also, other drinking measures (i.e., drinking frequency and average drinks per occasion) were not found to be significantly related to injury, although estimated coefficients were in the predicted direction. Conclusions: Complementary to studies that have noted that a large portion of injuries involve persons who have been drinking prior to injury, our findings suggest a link between likelihood of injury and general drinking patterns.