Review and analysis of literature on indicators of women's drinking problems

Our goal is to identify more relevant indicators of women's drinking problems. We first reviewed the literature on women's drinking problems to uncover the major issues and research problems that previous studies have raised. We then systematically analyzed 464 indicators of women's alcohol problems cited in the literature from 1970-86. We calculated the frequency of their appearance by source (literature review, clinical studies, research articles, or surveys) and organized them into a comprehensive indicator taxonomy that included physiological, social, psychological and behavioral categories. The resulting taxonomy can serve as a baseline for grounding indicators of women's alcohol problems collected from other sources, such as ethnographic studies of particular populations or surveys of the general population.