The Scottish Government

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Approach

This literature review covers the following areas related to the selling of alcohol through off-sales:

• Definitions and effects of off-sales promotions
• The selling of alcohol through off-sales
• Community implications of off-sales
• Impact of recent changes in English licensing law
• The exploration of links between off-sales and antisocial behaviour/crime

It examines research literature, policy documents, and newspaper and internet articles to give a picture of the nature of selling, promotions, links to antisocial behaviour and the effects of these on the local community. It must be noted that there is a paucity of data related to this subject area, in particular, a limited amount of articles related to the concept of promotions within the off-sales sector.

English language articles were analysed and collected through the Bath Information and Data Services ( BIDS) services as well as the databases listed in the appendix (see Appendix A). Material from the periods 1990 to 2006 was collected, both from the UK and internationally.

1.1 Questions considered

The main questions relating to the area of off-sales and problem drinking contained within this literature review are:

• Promotions
  • The concept of promotions within the off-sales trade ¹
  • What standard terms are used to define 'promotion'
  • Effects on purchasing patterns
• Alcohol off-sales in the community
  • Underage drinking
  • Drinking/purchasing whilst intoxicated
  • 'Front-loading'
  • Focus for antisocial behaviour
• Effects of selling alcohol off-sales in the community
  • Crime
  • Disorder
  • Injury
  • Off-sales location density

The data resources have been searched to gather the following:

• Published papers in peer reviewed academic journals
• Published Government papers
• Previous literature reviews and meta- analyses
• News articles
• Any available reports, reviews and outcome studies from services
• Also, material in more unconventional forms ('grey literature')

1.2 Search criteria

The terms in table 1 outline the main words used in various combinations when searching the databases. Single word and Boolean searches (words separated by the operators 'OR', 'AND' and 'NOT,' e.g. Albany University Library, 2004) were used when the exact phrase searches yielded too many, too few or irrelevant results.

Early on in the searches it was discovered that different databases operate using different taxonomies, this slowed the search as at times the word searches would not produce any results. To ensure that this was due to the lack of research rather than the combination of words used, searches would be modified to extract information from the databases.

When the above terms produced a high amount of information, other words were gradually introduced to the search criteria until the titles or abstracts or articles became more relevant to the review. These words were used to ensure additional information was not missed, but were not included in all searches as some searches gave a sufficiently small number of results to be examined in full without being further limited by these additional terms.

Table 1: Words used in searches

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