INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE ‘GENDER, CULTURE AND ALCOHOL PROBLEMS: A MULTI-NATIONAL STUDY’
1 Unit for Health Promotion Research, University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, Denmark, 2 Institute for Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology, Charité—University Medicine Berlin, Germany, 3 Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Drug Problems (SIPA), 4 Alcohol Treatment Center, Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland and 5 University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed at: Unit of Health Promotion Research, University of Southern Denmark, Niels Bohrs Vej 9, 6700 Esbjerg, Denmark. Tel: +45-6550 4111; Fax: +45-6550 4283. E-mail: kbl{at}health.sdu.dk
This paper provides an introduction to a series of articles reporting results from the EU concerted action "Gender, Culture and Alcohol Problems: A Multi-national Study" which examined differences in drinking among women and men in 13 European and two non-European countries. The gender gap in alcohol drinking is one of the few universal gender differences in human social behavior. However, the size of these differences varies greatly from one society to another. The papers in this issue examine, across countries, (1) men's and women's drinking patterns, (2) the prevalence of men's and women's experience of alcohol-related problems, (3) gender differences in social inequalities in alcohol use and abuse, (4) gender differences in the influence of combinations of social roles on heavy alcohol use, and (5) how societal-level factors predict women's and men's alcohol use and problems on a regional and global level. Country surveys were independently conducted and then centralized at one institution for further data standardization and processing. Several results indicated that the greater the societal gender equality in a country, the smaller the gender differences in drinking behavior. In most analyses the smallest gender differences in drinking behaviour were found in Nordic countries, followed by western and central European countries, with the largest gender differences in countries with developing economies.
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