the 1970 cohort have a tendency to drink more than women in the 1958 cohort or
whether it is the demographic circumstances of the 1970 cohort compared with the
1958 cohort (i.e. parental and marital status) that help to explain the differences in
alcohol consumption.
The paper has also shown that the association between social class and frequency of
drinking has declined between the two cohorts and that for both men and women beer
drinking has declined between the two cohorts for those with manual occupations,
while wine drinking has increased. These results are both suggestive that social class
differences in patterns of drinking behaviour are diminishing over time.
Preliminary analysis of the association between reported alcohol consumption and
cohort members’ continued participation in the study suggests that men reporting high
levels of alcohol consumption in a particular sweep are less likely to participate in the
next sweep of the study. Similar patterns were found for women but the results did not
reach significance at the 0.05 level. This suggests that any decline in reported alcohol
consumption over the lifecourse may partly be due to differential attrition and any
further longitudinal analyses should therefore be designed to take this into account.
In addition this paper has highlighted problems with the data on reported beer
consumption collected in 2000, when members of the 1958 cohort were aged 42 and
members of the 1970 cohort were aged 30. Further work will be undertaken to try and
correct this problem but analyses should be aware of the limitations of this data.
These data problems do not impact on the main findings reported in this paper, which
focuses on the data collected in 1991 for the 1958 cohort and 2004 for the 1970
cohort.
Notes
References
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Jefferis, B. J. M. H., C. Power, et al. (2004). "Adolescent drinking level and adult binge
drinking in a national birth cohort." Addiction 100: 543-549.
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