Rural and urban problem drinkers in six Southern states

In 1994-1997 we conducted a four-wave longitudinal study of rural and urban problem drinkers in six Southern United States states to examine rural/urban differences in predictors of service use and course of drinking. This report describes early rural/urban differences from a brief interview with over 3,000 community individuals and among 525 identified problem drinkers. Overall, we found rural/urban differences in alcohol consumption at the community level but only demographic differences among problem drinkers. Our newly developed screening interview for alcohol disorders had excellent agreement (kappa = 0.72) for lifetime disorders and good agreement (kappa = 0.53) for recent disorders against structured diagnostic interviews for DSM-IV criteria.