ACTGHS meets alcohol guideline, adult age groups

Commentary

In 2021, 66.1% of respondents to the ACT General Health Survey aged  18-24 years, 77.9% of respondents aged 25 to 44 years, 82.0% of respondents aged 45 to 64 years and 89.0% of respondents aged 65 years and over reported alcohol consumption which meets the guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol. Respondents aged 18 to 24 years were significantly less likely to report meeting the 2020 alcohol guideline than respondents aged 45 to 64 years and 65 years and over in 2021.

For the purpose of reporting the ACT General Health Survey data on HealthStats, if the 95% confidence intervals of the estimates do not overlap, they are considered to be significantly different.

The Australian alcohol guidelines recommend that healthy men and women should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week and no more than 4 standard drinks on any one day to reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury.

The less you drink, the lower your risk of harm from alcohol. For more information, visit Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol.

Estimate is based on respondents aged 18 years and over who answered the alcohol questions. It includes those who reported that they do not drink alcohol.

Note: The indicator shows self-reported data collected through Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). Estimates were weighted to adjust for differences in the probability of selection among respondents and were benchmarked to the estimated residential population using the latest available Australian Bureau of Statistics population estimates.

Data for the 2020 alcohol guideline are not collected every third year (i.e. 2019 and 2022).

Persons includes male, female, other and refused sex respondents and may not always add to the sum of male and female.

Statistically significant differences are difficult to detect for smaller jurisdictions such as the Australian Capital Territory. Sometimes, even large apparent differences may not be statistically significant. This is particularly the case in breakdowns of small populations because the small sample size means that there is not enough power to identify even large differences as statistically significant.

Chart

Proportion of adults aged 18 years and over who meet the 2020 alcohol guideline, by age group, ACT General Health Survey, 2020-2021

Data

To access the data, select "View source data" link at the bottom of the visualisation. This link will open up a data table that you can download.

Codes and sources

Q. On a day when you drink alcohol, how many standard drinks do you usually have?
Q. In the past 7 days, did you drink more than 10 standard drinks?

Don't know and refused responses were excluded from analysis.

A copy of the ACT General Health Survey questionnaires can be found in Data collections.