Besides the Drinking in Alcohol's Harm to Others: Potential Economic and Environmental Factors

This article considers how harm from others' drinking is distributed across several economic and environmental factors.

Economic, environmental, demographic, and drinking measures include household income, financial disadvantage indicators, and home spaciousness; neighborhood socioeconomic status, connections, and safety; and respondent's gender, age group, and risky drinking status. This article explores the interactions of these factors with harms from the drinking of others in a 2021 survey of 2,574 Australian adults.

The home's degree of crowding (persons per bedroom) is related to harms from others in the household, whereas financial disadvantage is related to harms from drinkers outside the household, whether known or strangers. Perceived neighborhood safety and knowing neighbors are negatively related to harms from the drinking of others outside the household. In multivariate analyses for harms from household members and strangers, these findings are little affected by three individual factors related to harms from others' drinking: the respondent's gender, age group, and risky drinking status.

Some economic and ecological factors play an important role in the occurrence of harm from others' drinking, but the relationship varies between factors and by the category of the other person involved.