Undergraduate Honors Theses

Date of Award

Spring 4-2022

Program

Psychology

Supervisor

Dr. Paul Tremblay

Abstract

Alcohol abuse and violence are two problem behaviors seen all over the world. Alcohol consumption has been correlated with homicide, an extreme form of violent behavior. Much of the past research looking into the relationship between alcohol and homicide has investigated individual level factors. For instance, acute intoxication and heavy drinking has been linked with homicide at this level. Minimal research has looked at this connection at the country level using time as a variable. The specific purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide at the country level and examine how this relationship changes over time using both latent growth modeling and multilevel modeling. Using these two analyses allowed for investigating the relationship at both the between country level and within country level. Further, alcohol consumption was broken down into alcohol types: wine, beer, and spirit. The latent growth analysis showed how the mean trajectories of both alcohol consumption and homicide are quite stable over time (i.e., flat), with only beer consumption having a small but significant decrease over time (b = 0.033, p < .01). Although little variance was seen within countries, there was significant variance seen between countries for both alcohol consumption and homicide. The multilevel analyses highlighted that alcohol types do have different relationships with homicide. Spirit consumption was positively correlated with homicide (r = .228, p = .002) and wine consumption was negatively correlated with homicide (r = -.249, p < .001). Overall, the current study did find support for a relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide, but it is moderated by alcohol type and independent of time.

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