Exploring Spatial Associations between On-Sale Alcohol Availability, Neighborhood Population Characteristics, and Violent Crime in a Geographically Isolated City
Objectives. Despite the increasing evidence of the associations between alcohol availability and violence, there are still inconsistent findings on the effects of on- and off-sale alcohol outlets on violent crime. The aim of this study was to examine spatial associations between on-sale alcohol availability, neighborhood characteristics, and violent crime in a geographically isolated city in Texas. Methods. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) and global regression models were employed to analyze the nature of the spatial relationship between violent crime, neighborhood sociocultural characteristics, and on-sale alcohol environment. Results. We found strong effects of neighborhood characteristics combined with on-sale alcohol availability on violence outcomes. Several neighborhood variables combined with alcohol availability explained about 63% of the variability in violence. An additional 7% was explained by the GWR model, while spatially nonstationary associations between violence and some predictor variables were observed. Conclusions. This study provided more credible evidence of the influence of on-sale alcohol outlets on violence in a unique setting. These findings have important policy implications in addressing the question of public health consequences of alcohol-related violence in local contexts. 1. Introduction Two-decades of ecological research has demonstrated that alcohol-related violence is not simply an individual-level problem but rather must be understood within the community context, and that alcohol availability and the opportunity that this creates for drinking are an integral part of this problem [1]. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have been used to assess the ecological relationship of various outlet density measures and place/population characteristics with violent crime across small geographic scales, including Census block groups [2], Census tracts [3], neighborhoods [4, 5], and zip codes [6, 7]. Although the specific relationship has varied by study setting, general findings show that neighborhoods with higher availability of alcohol are more likely to have higher rates of violent crime. There has also been some debate within the field of alcohol epidemiology as to whether alcohol outlet type, specifically on-sale versus off-sale premises, has differential effects on rates of violence. A recent study by Toomey and colleagues [5] found that the association with violence was stronger and more consistent in the case of on-sale than off-sale outlets although they noted that half of the previous studies that
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