Public opinion on alcohol policy: a review of U.S. research. | Goliath Business News

Although public sentiments concerning alcohol issues have long been a subject of historical and social research, public opinion in relation to specific alcohol policies has only recently emerged as a research area in its own right. In the late 1970s, Goodstadt et al. stated, "[a]pparently, no sophisticated studies of public attitudes towards [policies regarding] the pricing of alcoholic beverages have been completed" (1978: p. 1630). Approximately ten years later, while Crawford (1987) reviewed 266 studies of a variety of attitudes towards alcohol use and misuse, another review turned up "no published studies of public opinion on alcohol policy in the scientific literature" (Wagenaar & Streff, 1990: p. 190). (Wagenaar has subsequently added to the literature, as discussed later.) Leedham (1987: p. 935) observed that "public opinion data on alcohol and tobacco policy are rarely collected on a regular basis by policymakers. Only where the data feed into decision making in other policy areas, such as taxation policy, is the information collected as part of a data base." Leedham adds that tobacco policy has received more attention than alcohol policy. Thus it would appear that attention given to policy opinions per se has lagged behind that given to generic attitudes towards alcohol. Although the body of literature in this area has been growing, especially subsequent to the U.S. policy development project discussed in this special issue (Greenfield et al., 2004), the literature remains fragmented. Our intention here is to critically review major analyses of public opinion on alcohol policies in an effort to set a benchmark for the field and make suggestions for future research.