Estimating levels and trends in alcohol use – investigating the validity of estimates based on Norwegian population surveys
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5324/nje.v21i1.1422Sammendrag
Estimates of alcohol use from a series of cross-sectional face-to-face surveys, conducted by Synovate Norway on behalf of the Norwegian institute for alcohol and drug research during the 1990s and 2000s (the Substance Use Surveys, SUS), are compared with registered sales statistics of alcohol and estimates of alcohol use from Statistics Norway’s Health Surveys (HS). The results show that SUS estimates of levels and trends in alcohol use are in conflict with these alternative data sources, also when standard adjustment strategies (using poststratification weights, controlling for background characteristics in regressions) are used. We conclude that there is likely selection on alcohol use and other factors into the SUS samples, to a higher degree than in the HS samples, which renders standard estimates of alcohol use from SUS data unreliable. In fields such as substance use research, it is notoriously difficult to measure the phenomena we are interested in, and it is especially important to assess the validity of the survey estimates with data from alternative sourcesDownloads
Nedlastinger
Publisert
Hvordan referere
Utgave
Seksjon
Lisens
Norsk Epidemiologi licenses all content of the journal under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence. This means, among other things, that anyone is free to copy and distribute the content, as long as they give proper credit to the author(s) and the journal. For further information, see Creative Commons website for human readable or lawyer readable versions.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
