Alcohol Research Group

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          • ABOUT THE CENTER

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          • MEET THE DIRECTOR


            Senior Scientist, William (Bill) C. Kerr, PhD, is Director of ARG’s National Alcohol Research Center and Co-Directs the National Alcohol Survey and the Health Disparities projects.  Bill also serves as the scientific director at ARG and continues to lead R01 projects, including a grant to investigate secondhand harms from alcohol and other drugs.

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            Scientist Nina Mulia, DrPH, is Center Associate Director and Director of the Alcohol Services project. She specializes in and has published widely on race and ethnicity and socioeconomic disparities in heavy drinking, alcohol problems, and alcohol services utilization.

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          • ASSESSING HID OVER THE LIFECOURSE

            This project, led by Camillia Lui, PhD, traces trends in harmful drinking patterns over a 40-year period, and identifies a range of alcohol-related precursors and problems through event-based and population-based approaches to inform early screening and interventions for high-risk groups.

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          • MEET THE SURVEY CO-DIRECTOR

            Scientist and Deputy Scientific Director, Priscilla Martinez, oversees the survey design, data collection, and analyses.  In the latest cycle of the NAS, Priscilla conducted dried blood spot sampling to help better understand the relationship between how our immune systems work and what role they might play in how alcohol use can affect our mental health.

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Race, Stressors, and Alcohol-related Disparities

Funding: NIAAA R21 AA015397

While prior epidemiological research has revealed important racial/ethnic patterns in drinking and alcohol problems, there is limited understanding of why alcohol-related health disparities exist. At present, alcohol studies that illuminate causal factors are needed to help inform and target public health prevention, treatment, and community interventions. We propose to analyze existing, nationally representative, cross-sectional data from the 2005 National Alcohol Survey to examine associations between minority status, social stressors such as poverty, racial stigma, and perceived discrimination, heavy drinking, and alcohol-related health and social problems. In so doing, we will capitalize on the existence of a national data set that includes large oversamples of Black and Hispanic Americans, that provides fine-grained measures of alcohol consumption and problems, and that allows us to explore the interplay of social, economic, psychological, and cultural factors with heavy drinking and alcohol problems in separate subgroups of Blacks, Hispanics, and whites. Our conceptual approach is informed by a growing body of work on the health impacts of racial bias and economic disadvantage, and recognizes the importance of both social structural and cultural aspects of race/ethnicity. Our specific aims are: (1) to examine associations between minority status, exposure to social stressors, and psychological distress; (2) to explore relationships between social stressors and heavy drinking, and consider the intervening roles of psychological distress and situational drinking norms and attitudes; and (3) to explore associations between minority status, social stressors, and alcohol-related problems; racial/ethnic differences in pathways leading to heavy drinking and alcohol problems; and the role of malt liquor. This re-analysis will inform the development of a future multi-method study of alcohol-related disparities to more closely examine the relationships that emerge here, with the use of more comprehensive and multi-level measures.

Who We Are

About ARG

We are a non-profit research organization that seeks to improve public health through deepening our understanding of alcohol and other drug use and investigating innovative approaches to reduce its consequences for individuals, families, and communities.

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