Alcohol sale status and homicide victimization in Kentucky, 2005-2012: Is there a spatial association?

Submitted: 25 October 2018
Accepted: 19 February 2019
Published: 14 May 2019
Abstract Views: 1211
PDF: 635
HTML: 26
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

To date, the association between the alcohol sale status of decedents' residence and alcohol-related homicide victimization have not been studied as far as we know. The current study aims to: i) determine whether homicide victims who were residents of wet counties had higher odds of testing positive for alcohol than their counterparts in moist or dry counties after adjusting for confounders; ii) determine whether homicides and alcohol-related homicides tend to cluster spatially; iii) determine whether the aforementioned associations exist only in highly-populated counties. A multilevel logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the data on homicide victims in the Kentucky Violent Death Reporting System from 2005 to 2012. Spatial statistics were used to determine the spatial autocorrelation in rates of homicides and alcohol-related homicides. Overall, 944 homicide victims were included. The male to female ratio was 3:1. About 32.8% of homicide victims tested positive for alcohol. About 33.0% of homicide decedents who were residents in wet counties tested positive for alcohol compared to 32.5% of their counterparts in moist/dry counties. Residence in wet counties was associated with a statistically insignificant increase in the unadjusted odds ratio (OR) of alcohol-related homicide victimization (OR=1.20, 95% CI=0.81-1.77) as well as the adjusted odds (aOR=1.33, 95% CI=0.83-2.12). There was no association between population size and alcohol-related homicide rate.

Dimensions

Altmetric

PlumX Metrics

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Citations

How to Cite

Khaleel, H. A., Brown, S., Fleming, S., & Christian, W. J. (2019). Alcohol sale status and homicide victimization in Kentucky, 2005-2012: Is there a spatial association?. Geospatial Health, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/gh.2019.747

List of Cited By :

Crossref logo