Issues: Effectiveness of alcohol policy interventions varies across times and places. The circumstances under which effective polices can be successfully transferred between contexts are typically unexplored with little attention given to developing reporting requirements that would facilitate systematic investigation.
Approach: Using purposive sampling and expert elicitation methods, we identified context-related factors impacting on the effectiveness of population-level alcohol policies. We then drew on previous characterisations of alcohol policy contexts and methodological-reporting checklists to design a new checklist for reporting contextual information in evaluation studies.
Key findings: Six context factor domains were identified: (i) baseline alcohol consumption, norms and harm rates; (ii) baseline affordability and availability; (iii) social, microeconomic and demographic contexts; (iv) macroeconomic context; (v) market context; and (vi) wider policy, political and media context. The checklist specifies information, typically available in national or international reports, to be reported in each domain.
Implications: The checklist can facilitate evidence synthesis by providing: (i) a mechanism for systematic and more consistent reporting of contextual data for meta-regression and realist evaluations; (ii) information for policy-makers on differences between their context and contexts of evaluations; and (iii) an evidence base for adjusting prospective policy simulation models to account for policy context.
Conclusions: Our proposed checklist provides a tool for gaining better understanding of the influence of policy context on intervention effectiveness. Further work is required to rationalise and aggregate checklists across interventions types to make such checklists practical for use by journals and to improve reporting of important qualitative contextual data.
Keywords: alcohol policy; policy context; policy evaluation; policy transfer; realist synthesis.
© 2014 The Authors. Drug and Alcohol Review published by Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd on behalf of Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs.