Adnum, L (2022) Social capital and alcohol risks among older adults (50 years and over): Analysis from the Drink Wise Age Well Survey. Ageing & Society. ISSN 0144-686X
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Abstract
Although there has been significant research on the relationship between alcohol consumption and demographic and psychological influences this does not consider the effect of social influence among older drinkers and if these effects differ between men and women. One aspect of social influence is social capital. The aim of this paper is to examine whether relational and cognitive social capital are associated with higher or lower risk of alcohol use among adults aged fifty years or older and to assess the extent to which this relationship differs between men and women. To investigate this, data was collected from a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of adults over the age of fifty in the United Kingdom who were recruited from General Practitioners. The sample consisted of 9,984 individuals whose mean age was 63.87 years. From this data, we developed proxy measures of social capital and associate these with respondent’s level of alcohol consumption as measured on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT-10) scale. In the sample just over twenty per cent reported an increasing risk or dependency on alcohol. Using two expressions of social capital, relational (social relationships) and cognitive (knowledge acquisition and understanding), we found that greater levels of both are associated with a reduced risk of higher drinking risk. Being female had no significant effect when combined with relational capital but did have a significant effect when combined with cognitive capital. It is argued that interventions to enhance social relations among older people and education to help understand alcohol risks would be helpful to protect older people from the damaging effects of excessive alcohol consumption.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information and Comments: | This article has been published in Aging & Society https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ageing-and-society. This version is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. No commercial re-distribution or re-use allowed. Derivative works cannot be distributed. © copyright holder. |
| Keywords: | Public Health, alcohol, older adults, social capital, polychoric correlation, logistic regression |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Laura Adnum |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Apr 2022 11:05 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Jan 2023 11:36 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3515 |
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