• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.21-34
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• 2016

Objectives: This is to review drinking behavior and policies to reduce harms caused by alcohol use in Korea and to discuss their implications from a health promotion perspective. Methods: A purported selection was made to include extant literature on drinking behaviors and alcohol control policies into this review. For drinking behaviors reports of national health statistics were used while reports of alcohol control policies submitted to public institutes/organizations were selected for review. Results: Alcohol consumption per capita indicates stable trends over the last two decades. However, percentages of drinkers with high risk drinking over time vary; men remains stable while female appears to increase. Relatively, a few data and/or reports were available about harms derived from alcohol use. Although there are alcohol policies being cost-effective to deal with alcohol related harm in Western society, few alcohol policy available in Korea of being effective, cost-effective with respect to reduction of harms associated with alcohol use. Conclusions: Policy emphasis should be shift from drinkers to availability of alcohol to reduce alcohol related harms with taking health in all policies into consideration. Both statutory mechanism and public acceptance should be of high priority in putting recommended alcohol policy into action.

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.103-113
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• 2012

Objectives: This study aims to identify the effects of environmental characteristics of the community on adults' drinking problems with held constant effects of characteristics of drinkers themselves. Methods: A multi-level regression analysis was employed to differentiate the variances accounted for by measurements both at individual and group levels. Data on individual demographic, behavioral, and mental health status were obtained from the Community Health Survey conducted in 2009 in the province of Kyunggido, which include 41,376 respondents aged 19 and over. This study included 28,335 adults who were classified as drinkers. They were from 45 communities(si, gun, or gu) for which data on contextual characteristics were collected by secondary data available on local government websites and KOSIS(Korea Statistical Information System). Results: Multi-level analyses showed that the variance of the dependent variable, harmful use of alcohol measured by alcohol use disorder identification test was independently accounted for by variance of independent variables at group level, including number of on-premises alcohol outlet per inhabitant and divorce rate, with held other independent variables of the model controlled. Conclusions: This study confirms that in order to prevent and reduce harms caused by harmful use of alcohol requires restricting physical availability of alcohol in the community where the drinker lives.