Determinants of Female Alcoholism in Europe: Multilevel Approach

Female alcoholism is not usually perceived as a serious issue, because males consume much more alcohol and figures on females’ binge drinking are significantly lower than those on males. Nevertheless, both physical and social consequences of excessive alcohol use are more drastic for females and non-acceptance of female bingeing may lead to underestimation of female excessive drinking may lead to serious imbalance in national alcohol policy. Socio-economical and psychologic reasons underlying females drinking remain relatively unexplored. Present paper is aimed to this gap and to uncover more factors, which influence volumes of alcohol consumed by females. GENACIS project was used as a source of data for multilevel regression models. In the resulting models, GDP and GINI coefficient turned out to be insignificant. It is shown that elder age and marriage influence females’ drinking negatively. Also, there were registered interaction effects between gender and confession prevailing in the country and between gender and higher education. Females in Protestant countries and better-educated females are more prone to drink excessive volumes of alcohol.