Relationship Between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Food and Alcohol Access--An Ecological Study

Purpose: The neighborhoods where people live can shape the dietary and alcohol choices they make. Poor neighborhoods tend to have fewer resources for promoting good health, but it is not know whether neighborhood access to food and alcohol are related, and whether the relationship between food and alcohol access differs by socioeconomic status. The purpose of this study is to examine whether access to supermarkets and grocery stores is associated with access to liquor stores and whether this relationship differs by neighborhood socioeconomic status.

Methods: Data for this study were drawn from the U.S. Census and InfoUSA Business Datasets (2002) which were linked by census tract areas. Neighborhoods were defined as census tracts within Hennepin County, Minnesota. Census 2000 was used to assess neighborhood socioeconomic status. InfoUSA data were used to estimate counts of 3318 food and liquor stores. Measures of socioeconomic position included education, employment status, median household income, and poverty level. Poisson models were used to estimate effects and included zero-inflated poisson models.

Results: Higher counts of liquor stores were positively associated with counts of supermarkets and grocery stores after adjusting for socioeconomic status (RR=1.36, 95% CI: 1.20, 1.55). Lower counts of supermarkets and grocery stores were associated with lower income neighborhoods (RR=0.98, 95% CI: 0.95, 0.99). The relationship between access to liquor stores and grocery stores did not vary by socioeconomic status (p=0.89).

Discussion: Food and liquor stores tend to cluster together in neighborhoods. Future studies should examine the mechanisms through which food and liquor stores co-occur.