Center Grant

Environmental Approaches to Prevention
Principal Investigator: Paul J. Gruenewald, Ph.D.

The Center grant builds upon developmental research of the earlier Center Grants and reflects longer term, longitudinal research in an effort to take advantage of improved and more complex research designs and statistical tools to untangle the multiple and complex relationships in the prevention field.

Administrative Core
Component Director: Joel W. Grube, Ph.D.

The Administrative Core of the Prevention Research Center performs the essential organizational and administrative functions for the entire center, supporting the infrastructure critical to the goals and aims of PRC, for the period from December 1, 2002 through November 30, 2007. The administrative time of the Principal Investigator, Scientific Director, Executive Assistant, and the Librarian are contained within this Core. The Core has coordinating responsibility over all center grant research components as well as other funded research projects not a part of the Center Grant. Scientific standards and public awareness are primary functions of the Core. The Core sponsors travel to scientific meetings for presentation of research papers. Alcohol prevention is multidisciplinary, so the Center cannot function in isolation. PRC staff are involved in a range of activities designed to create a scientific base for public discussion about alcohol issues and contribute to awareness and rational public debate. The major external functions of the Core support participation in scientific and professional meetings, conference sponsorship, consultation, participation in advisory groups, expert panels or direct technical assistance, providing testimony, research review, editorial review, professional associations, and training.

The Core has responsibility for internal (to PRC) and external functions. Major internal functions of the Core include:

Under its internal function, the Administrative Core ensures the continuity and coordination of all research components.

The four research components of this study are described below.

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Alcohol Outlets and Underage Sales
Component Director: Paul J. Gruenewald, Ph.D.

Empirical studies of the relationships between alcohol outlets, alcohol use and related problems have demonstrated that greater outlet densities are related to drinking and alcohol-related problems among adults. The literature on alcohol outlets, youth alcohol use and related-problems is not as developed but indicates that underage youth may purchase alcohol themselves (usually from off-premise outlets), arrange purchases through others, or obtain alcohol by other social means. Among these modes of access to alcohol, direct underage purchases are often successful. If densities of alcohol outlets affect the likelihood that underage youth will successfully purchase alcohol, then regulation of these outlets may be a useful strategy to control underage sales.

The proposed research seeks to answer three questions: (1) Does the physical availability of alcohol affect the distribution of alcohol-related problems among young people? (2) Does the physical availability of alcohol affect the distribution of alcohol-related arrests among young people? (3) Does the physical availability of alcohol affect patterns of youth access to alcohol? These questions will be answered through geostatistical analyses of archival data from the state of California and multilevel analyses of individual survey data from areas of the state with high, average and low off-premise outlet densities.

Study #1 will examine the spatial and temporal relationships between youth population distributions, retail market areas, alcohol outlet densities, and hospitalizations related to youth use of alcohol across approximately 1,493 zip code areas over 13 years.

Study #2 will examine the spatial and temporal relationships between youth population distributions, retail market areas, alcohol outlet densities, and arrests related to youth use of alcohol for about 413 police jurisdictions over 13 years.

Study #3 will use a geographically based multilevel model to examine the effects of outlet densities and local population characteristics on self-reported patterns of youth access to alcohol.

The goals of the study are to understand the mechanisms by which alcohol outlets may affect underage sales and related problems and to provide an assessment of the effects of outlets on youth problems.

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Alcohol Availability and Underage Drinking
Component Director: Joel W. Grube, Ph.D.

Although community-level restrictions on alcohol availability to youth are important local intervention strategies, little is known about how variations in local physical availability of alcohol are related to: (a) alcohol consumption and problems among young people, (b) the use of alternative sources of alcohol, or (c) drinking trajectories over time. Moreover, the processes through which restrictions in alcohol availability affect drinking by young people are unknown. Differences in the physical availability of alcohol may influence drinking and related problems directly or may be mediated through beliefs about the ease of obtaining alcohol (subjective availability), beliefs about the personal consequences of drinking (alcohol expectancies), or perceptions of drinking norms (normative beliefs). Alternatively, physical availability may affect drinking and drinking-related problems among young people because it moderates the relationships between predispositions to drink and alcohol consumption. In particular, lower availability may weaken these relationships.

In order to gain better understanding of the role of physical availability of alcohol in adolescent drinking, we will undertake a 3-year longitudinal random digit dial telephone survey study of 1,500 young people (ages 15-17 at Wave 1) sampled from 50 zip codes in the state of California that are known to differ in alcohol outlet density and socioeconomic status. The study will proceed from a well-developed conceptual model that includes community-level variables (outlet density, population density, SES, ethnic composition, community disorganization) as well as individual-level variables (drinking, drinking beliefs, personal risk factors, background characteristics). The model further specifies how the effects of community variables are mediated through and possibly moderate the effects of drinking predispositions. Multilevel latent variable structural equations modeling and multilevel latent variable growth modeling techniques will be used to test this conceptual model.

The ultimate goal of this research is to (a) provide a better understanding of how physical availability of alcohol in the form of outlet density affects adolescent drinking and drinking problems and thereby (b) provide a better basis for designing and implementing more effective interventions to reduce and prevent adolescent drinking. Ultimately, this information will help policy makers and community advocates make better decisions about local prevention activities and the allocation of scarce prevention resources.

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State Level Availability and Alcohol Problems
Component Director: Paul J. Gruenewald, Ph.D.

Economic, physical, and demographic restrictions on the availability of alcohol (i.e., increases in the price of alcohol, reductions in alcohol outlet densities, and increases in minimum legal drinking age) have been related to alcohol use and related problems. These studies have not examined the joint effects of restrictions on economic, physical, and demographic availability on alcohol use and related problems. No studies have comprehensively examined the relative contributions of different restrictions on availability one to the other or considered whether different regulatory policies may have different effects in different states.

The research proposed in this 5-year project will reexamine and extend prior studies of the relationships between controls on alcohol availability, alcohol use, and related problems to (1) assess the joint contributions of changes in availability upon alcohol sales and related problems and (2) determine whether the same availability policy has the same or different effects in different states. A federal tax policy may reduce alcohol-related crashes by 2% across states, yet have no effect in some states and dramatic effects in others. It will be argued that such differences are predictable from simple formulations of the relationships between availability, use and problems.

The proposed work will construct a state level dataset that includes measures of economic, physical, and demographic restrictions on availability, alcohol sales, self-reported alcohol use, and alcohol-related morbidity and mortality for 48 states over approximately 30 years (n ´ t = 1,440). These data will be used to answer four questions: (1) What are the independent contributions of changes in economic, physical, and demographic availability to changes in alcohol sales? (2) Are the effects of one form of availability (e.g., economic) conditional upon another (e.g., physical)? (3) What are the independent contributions of changes in economic, physical, and demographic availability to changes in alcohol related problems? (4) Are these effects "fixed" or are they conditional upon state level characteristics of drinking populations?

The short-term goal of the proposed work will be to replicate and extend prior studies of availability, use and problems. It will also assess the degree to which the effects of availability are contingent upon one another and other state level characteristics. The long-term goals of the study are to support state-specific alcohol policy recommendation.

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Dissemination and Diffusion of Science-Based Prevention
Component Director: Kathy Stewart, Ph.D.

The overall goal for the dissemination component of the Prevention Research Center (PRC) is to increase the incorporation of PRC scientific findings into the understanding and practice of policy-makers and practitioners in the alcohol prevention field. PRC has developed and will continue to develop research findings, implementation tools, and research methods that have broad utility to policy-makers, practitioners, and the general public in the areas of alcohol policy, alcohol consumption, and alcohol problem epidemiology and prevention. These materials can be useful only if incorporated into policy and practice. The aims of this Component are to: (1) disseminate relevant scientific findings, program designs, guides, manuals, and research methodologies that have direct applicability to policy and practice in alcohol problem prevention, (2) increase the diffusion of scientific prevention tools and strategies to prevention policy-makers and practitioners, and the general public, and (3) support the adoption of scientifically-based prevention strategies into actual practice. The funding of this Component will enable PRC to transform existing and future findings and tools into materials that will be useful to a variety of audiences. A monitoring and measurement system will be implemented to track the diffusion and adoption of PRC materials. The activities of the education component will be in addition to a continuation of the publication of research findings in scientific journals.

The diffusion and adoption of scientific findings often confronts serious barriers. To help avoid and overcome these barriers, this component will utilize an interactive dissemination process that involves representatives of target audiences. A core advisory panel and ad hoc review panels made up of key information gatekeepers for policy-makers, practitioners, and the general public will be selected and involved in all aspects of the component. With these advisors, PRC will select findings regarding critical components of successful prevention programs and translate them into formats that target audiences can understand and apply in their work. The demand for PRC's research findings as well as other prevention research findings and prevention tools will be stimulated among practitioners, policy makers, and in the general population and citizen groups. Venues for dissemination will be selected for the specific audience and will include a dissemination web site, CD-ROMs, videos, presentations at conferences, and written materials.

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