Towards agreement on ways to measure and report drinking patterns and alcohol-related problems in adult general population surveys: the Skarpö conference overview.

A thematic conference of the Kettil Bruun Society (KBS) for Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol was held in Skarpö, near Stockholm, on April 3-7, 2000. The goals of the meeting were to develop consensus sets of questionnaire items for measuring alcohol consumption and social harm, to delineate statistical and practical concerns related to the aggregation of consumption and harm data and to identify summary measures to be used for descriptive purposes and in analyses of the association between alcohol intake and alcohol-related outcomes. The results of the conference discussions are summarized below, with emphasis on both areas where the conference yielded recommendations for measures and methods of aggregation for analysis, and on areas where consensus could not be obtained and/or where additional research is needed.