USE OF SPATIAL MODELS FOR COMMUNITY PROGRAM-EVALUATION OF CHANGES IN ALCOHOL OUTLET DISTRIBUTION

Alcohol outlets have geographic and spatial characteristics which are important for researchers to consider when planning and evaluating com munity prevention programs. Community-level data used in monitoring al cohol problems across community areas and over time exhibit spatial de pendencies. Statistical procedures which depend on assumptions of inde pendence may fail to give proper results in such a situation. Specific statistical techniques have been developed which adjust for the effec ts of spatial dependencies in measures across geography. This paper pr ovides an example of the creation and use of computer Geographic Infor mation Systems to display community alcohol outlets and alcohol-involv ed problems and the use of statistical analysis techniques which accou nt for such spatial dependencies over time. This paper introduces the concepts, terminology, and justification for considering spatial analy sis in community prevention planning, research and evaluation. The sel ection of a geographical unit of analysis will be discussed. Finally, as a demonstration, a variety of spatial statistics are applied to com munity spatial data for evaluation.