Public attitudes towards alcohol control policies in Scotland and England: Results from a mixed-methods study

Abstract

The harmful effects of heavy drinking on health have been widely reported, yet public opinion on governmental responsibility for alcohol control remains divided. This study examines UK public attitudes towards alcohol policies, identifies underlying dimensions that inform these, and relationships with perceived effectiveness. A cross-sectional mixed methods study involving a telephone survey of 3477 adult drinkers aged 16–65 and sixteen focus groups with 89 adult drinkers in Scotland and England was conducted between September 2012 and February 2013. Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to reduce twelve policy statements into underlying dimensions. These dimensions were used in linear regression models examining alcohol policy support by demographics, drinking behaviour and perceptions of UK drinking and government responsibility. Findings were supplemented with a thematic analysis of focus group transcripts. A majority of survey respondents supported all alcohol policies, although the level of support varied by type of policy. Greater enforcement of laws on under-age sales and more police patrolling the streets were strongly supported while support for pricing policies and restricting access to alcohol was more divided. PCA identified four main dimensions underlying support on policies: alcohol availability, provision of health information and treatment services, alcohol pricing, and greater law enforcement. Being female, older, a moderate drinker, and holding a belief that government should do more to reduce alcohol harms were associated with higher support on all policy dimensions. Focus group data revealed findings from the survey may have presented an overly positive level of support on all policies due to differences in perceived policy effectiveness. Perceived effectiveness can help inform underlying patterns of policy support and should be considered in conjunction with standard measures of support in future research on alcohol control policies.

Improving Knowledge that Alcohol Can Cause Cancer is Associated with Consumer Support for Alcohol Policies: Findings from a Real-World Alcohol Labelling Study

“…The magnitude of the associations were also consistent with previously published cross-sectional studies examining population-level effects and the association between increases in individual-level knowledge of the alcohol-cancer link and support for pricing policies observed in this study [36][37][38]. Other receiver characters associated with support for alcohol pricing, marketing, and availability policies in this study, such as being female, being of older age, having higher levels of education, and consuming lower levels of alcohol, are consistent with previous studies [35,37,[76][77][78][79]. Moreover, this study also observed, regardless of knowledge of the alcohol-cancer relationship, higher levels of support for alcohol marketing policies, relative to policies controlling the hours alcohol can be sold in off-premise retail outlets and the minimum unit price of alcohol, which are largely consistent with research from the US, Europe, and Australia [35][36][37][38]76].…”

Mapping and comparing French people’s positions regarding restrictive control policies: a pilot study

“…These positions related, as expected, with participants' demographic characteristics, the type of addictive behavior, and consumption habits. These findings are consistent with those of previous studies that showed that public opinion varied considerably towards leisure activity policies and that these views were associated with sociodemographic characteristics [26,35,36].…”

“…more police patrolling the streets) compared to policies restricting the availability of alcohol (e.g. increasing prices) [35,36]. This would therefore suggest, for example, that people are most concerned by the high-level of mortality caused by traffic accidents [35].…”

Healthy Public Policy Options to Promote Physical Activity for Chronic Disease Prevention: Understanding Canadian Policy Influencer and General Public Preferences

“…Despite this limitation, the overall sample size is comparable with similar studies of this nature. 26,29,30 Furthermore, the demographic profile of policy influencer respondents in our survey (eg, skewed toward older age and male) mirrors the demographic profile of policy leaders in Canada more generally. 31,32 Although we also had a relatively low response rate for members of the general public, participants were selected to mirror the demographic profiles found within each province.…”