Using theories of practice to develop event-level alcohol epidemiology and policy analysis: Studying context, consumption and harm
Research Team: Abigail Stevely, Prof John Holmes, Prof Petra Meier, Simon McNamara, Dr Frank de Vocht & Dr Rita Neves 
Who's involved: University of Sheffield & University of Bristol
1 November 2017 – 31 October 2020
This project is informed by theories of practice and uses data on how people drink alcohol to find out which ways of drinking are harmful and to assess the effect that changing the law on serving alcohol had on how people drink. Alcohol is drunk in a variety of situations such as drinking beer at a pub with friends or relaxing alone on the sofa, which is often overlooked by research. Considering the contexts of alcohol consumption can help researchers to understand how and why interventions affect alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm.
This project includes two comprehensive reviews of the large existing literature linking contextual characteristics of drinking occasions to alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm. This informs the other two studies in the project – a policy evaluation and an epidemiological study. The first of these evaluated the effects of the Licensing Act 2003 on drinking occasions, which deregulated trading hours in England & Wales. The second applied decision tree modelling to generate new evidence on the complex relationships between contextual characteristics and alcohol consumption within drinking occasions.
Publications
Stevely, A., Holmes, J., & Meier, P. (2021). Combinations of drinking occasion characteristics associated with units of alcohol consumed among British adults: an event‐level decision tree modeling study. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 45(3), 630-637.
Stevely, A. K., Vocht, F., Neves Lic, R. B., Holmes, J., & Meier, P. S. (2021). Evaluating the effects of the Licensing Act 2003 on the characteristics of drinking occasions in England & Wales: A theory of change‐guided evaluation of a natural experiment. Addiction, 116(9), 2348-2359.
Holmes, J., Beard, E., Brown, J., Brennan, A., Meier, P. S., Michie, S., . . . Buykx, P. F. (2020). Effects on alcohol consumption of announcing and implementing revised UK low-risk drinking guidelines : findings from an interrupted time series analysis. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 74(11), 942-949.
Stevely, A. K., Holmes, J., McNamara, S., & Meier, P. S. (2020). Drinking contexts and their association with acute alcohol‐related harm : a systematic review of event‐level studies on adults’ drinking occasions. Drug and Alcohol Review, 39(4), 309-320.
McNamara, S., Holmes, J., Stevely, A., & Tsuchiya, A. (2020). How averse are the UK general-public to inequalities in health between socioeconomic groups? A systematic review. The European Journal of Health Economics, 21(2), 275-285.
Stevely, A. K., Holmes, J., & Meier, P. S. (2020). Contextual characteristics of adults’ drinking occasions and their association with levels of alcohol consumption and acute alcohol‐related harm : a mapping review. Addiction, 115(2), 218-229.
Holmes, J., Beard, E., Brown, J., Brennan, A., Kersbergen, I., Meier, P. S., . . . Buykx, P. (2020). The impact of promoting revised UK low-risk drinking guidelines on alcohol consumption: interrupted time series analysis. Public Health Research, 8(14).