A cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between tobacco and alcohol outlet density and neighbourhood deprivation
Niamh K Shortt1*, Catherine Tisch1, Jamie Pearce1, Richard Mitchell2, Elizabeth A Richardson1, Sarah Hill3 and Jeff Collin3
Abstract
Background: There is a strong socio-economic gradient in both tobacco-and alcohol-related harm. One possible factor contributing to this social gradient may be greater availability of tobacco and alcohol in more socially-deprived areas. A higher density of tobacco and alcohol outlets is not only likely to increase supply but also to raise awareness of tobacco/alcohol brands, create a competitive local market that reduces product costs, and influence local social norms relating to tobacco and alcohol consumption. This paper examines the association between the density of alcohol and tobacco outlets and neighbourhood-level income deprivation.
Methods: Using a national tobacco retailer register and alcohol licensing data this paper calculates the density of alcohol and tobacco retail outlets per 10,000 population for small neighbourhoods across the whole of Scotland. Average outlet density was calculated for neighbourhoods grouped by their level of income deprivation. Associations between outlet density and deprivation were analysed using one way analysis of variance.
Results: There was a positive linear relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and outlets for both tobacco (p <0.001) and off-sales alcohol (p <0.001); the most deprived quintile of neighbourhoods had the highest densities of both. In contrast, the least deprived quintile had the lowest density of tobacco and both off-sales and on-sales alcohol outlets.
Conclusions: The social gradient evident in alcohol and tobacco supply may be a contributing factor to the social gradient in alcohol- and tobacco-related disease. Policymakers should consider such gradients when creating tobacco and alcohol control policies. The potential contribution to public health, and health inequalities, of reducing the physical availability of both alcohol and tobacco products should be examined in developing broader supply-side interventions.
Keywords: Alcohol, Tobacco, Health inequalities, Retail environment, Density, Deprivation
Background
Tobacco and alcohol use continue to pose significant public health challenges and are leading causes of prevent-able morbidity and mortality worldwide [1, 2]. Combined tobacco-and alcohol-related illnesses are estimated to account for 12.5 % of all deaths globally [1]. Strong socio-economic gradients in consumption of, and harm from, both substances persist. Smoking and heavy alcohol
consumption are inextricably linked to poverty and deprivation [3]. Research has shown that socially deprived populations are more likely to report heavier drinking [4], and to die from alcohol-related causes [5, 6]. Furthermore smoking rates have been declining at a faster pace amongst higher compared to lower socio-economic groups [7].
Alcohol-and tobacco-related behaviours are strongly influenced by a multitude of social, cultural and environ-mental factors [8]. One possible factor contributing to the social gradient in tobacco-and alcohol-related harm may be greater availability of tobacco and alcohol in more socially-deprived areas. A higher density of to-bacco and alcohol outlets is not only likely to increase
* Correspondence: niamh.shortt@ed.ac.uk
1Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health, School of
Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Drummond St, Edinburgh EH8 9XP,
Scotland, UK
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
© 2015 Shortt et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Shortt et al. BMC Public Health (2015) 15:1014
DOI 10.1186/s12889-015-2321-1
supply but also to raise awareness of tobacco/alcohol brands, create a competitive local market that reduces product costs, and influence local social norms relating to tobacco and alcohol consumption [9]. Research, largely from North America, has shown that tobacco and alcohol outlets are more prevalent in deprived areas and are inde-pendently associated with higher likelihood of smoking and drinking [10–16]. In response to such evidence the
Institute of Medicine has called for a restriction on the number of tobacco outlets [17] while the World Health Organisation recommends national-level action plans that regulate the availability of alcohol [2]. Such supply side in-terventions may represent a new direction in both tobacco and alcohol control.
To date, research has tended to explore smoking and al-cohol environments separately. This is problematic since alcohol and tobacco outlets often co-locate, and evidence suggests that related behaviours also co-occur [18]. This paper, focussing on neighbourhoods in Scotland, UK, is the first to investigate whether more socially-deprived areas tend also to have greater availability of both alcohol and tobacco outlets. Combined, smoking and alcohol in-take are two of the most important preventable causes of ill-health and premature death in Scotland, where one in every five deaths is attributable to tobacco [19] and one in 20 attributable to alcohol [20]. Such deaths and ill-health have a marked social gradient. In Scotland those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods are 6 times more likely to die from an alcohol-related illness, and 7.5 times more likely to be hospitalised for an alcohol-related illness com-pared to those in the least deprived neighbourhoods [21]. Similarly 32 % of deaths in the most deprived areas of Scotland are attributable to smoking, compared with 15 % in more affluent areas [22], with smoking rates ranging from 40 % in the former to 10 % in the latter [23]. Such trends in alcohol and tobacco related health are not unique to Scotland and as such alcohol and tobacco con-sumption may be key factors in understanding the persist-ence of national level health inequalities over recent decades, with both factors on the pathway between social disadvantage and poor health [24].
Methods
Outlet data
The Tobacco and Primary Medical Services (Scotland) Act 2010 established a national register requiring all Scot-tish retailers selling tobacco products to be registered by 1 October 2011. We obtained the addresses and postcodes of all premises registered on the Scottish Tobacco Re-tailers Register as at 30 September 2012 (n = 11,449).
After removing duplicates our final dataset contained 10,161 tobacco outlets.
All premises selling alcohol in Scotland must be li-censed under the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005. We
obtained the addresses and postcodes of outlets licensed to sell alcohol on site, such as a restaurant or bar (‘on-sales’ n = 11,359) and for those licensed to sell alcohol for consumption off the premises (‘off-sales’ n = 4,800) in 2012 from individual local Liquor Licensing Boards (n = 36). The format of the data varied (some as lists in word documents, others as excel spread sheets) with the data collection stage taking 9 months. We checked the number of premises in our dataset against official pub-lished statistics. Our outlet dataset (collected in Autumn 2012) had 1.3 % fewer on-sales, 1.4 % fewer off-sales, and
1.4 % fewer outlets overall than reported by the Scottish Liquor Licensing Statistics 2011–12 (as of 31 March 2012)
[25]. Part of the discrepancy could be due to our data col-lection later in 2012, and part due to our careful cleaning of the dataset to remove duplicate entries from the licens-ing board data we were provided with.
We created measures of outlet density for every data zone in Scotland with population (n = 6,502), using ESRI
ArcMap 10.1 geographical information system (GIS) software. Data zones are the core small area units in Scotland for which statistics are made available (mean population 817 in 2012, source: Information Services Division). First, we mapped locations of all tobacco and alcohol outlets based on the coordinates of their post-codes (each postcode in the UK represent approximately address points). We then undertook a Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). This transforms the spatial pattern of outlet locations into a continuous ‘surface’ which repre-sents the density of outlets and is not constrained by area-level boundaries. In brief, the KDE process divides Scotland into 100x100 m grid cells, and assesses the number and proximity of outlets within an 800 m radius for each cell. This radius was chosen as a plausible walk-ing distance to get to an outlet. Outlets nearer the centre of the search window are given greater weight than those further away. As a result, rather than reporting the number of outlets for each data zone, the KDE value represents a proximity-weighted estimate of the density of each outlet type per km2. This method has advantages over other density measures as it considers density and proximity together [26]. We created KDE surfaces for all tobacco outlets, all alcohol outlets, alcohol off-sales out-lets and alcohol on-sales outlets. We assigned each data zone the KDE values for the cell in which its population-weighted centroid was located, rather than the data zone mean, to better reflect the density of outlets where the majority of population reside.
Neighbourhood deprivation
We then gathered an indicator of socio-economic deprivation fo
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