Index Spread and importance of the phenomenon Data and samples Measurement of variables Independent and control variables “Binge Drinking” is a much debated term. Historically it can be defined in two main different ways, with the discrepancy mainly relating to the duration of the episode in question, but also based on the actual amount of alcohol consumed. The first, and oldest, definition of the term refers to a prolonged episode of excessive alcohol consumption to the point of experiencing a hangover, usually involving more than a single day (WHO, 1994). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The other, and more common usage nowadays, is to explain a drinking situation in a much shorter period of time, mostly several hours. There have been some attempts to try to define the concept more objectively, for example by identifying this behavior with the consumption of 5 or more glasses successively (Cahalan & Room, 1974). Another slightly different definition of this term is the consumption of half the suggested weekly amount of alcohol in a single session (Bennet et al.'s, 1990), which can be quantified as at least 10 units for men and 7 for women. women.According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge eating is interpreted as an event that leads to a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08% or more (0.8 g/l), which occurs after 5 drinks for men and 4 for women. two hours (NIAAA). The problem with this technical definition, and why it has been widely criticized, is because there is also some subjectivity to take into account, such as a person's drinking capacity, a person's drinking habits, as well as differences in tolerance related to different sex, age and even occasion. The basic idea that people have of "binge eating" is that of drinking so much that they become intoxicated with the desire to get drunk, but in reality the problem with this explanation is that no one is evaluating the speed of consumption and the concentration of alcohol present in the blood, which can certainly be considered more objective measures of intoxication. After the comment on the different uses of the term, for the purposes of my speech always refer to "binge eating" with the consumption of 5 glasses or more in a single short episode, because I want to take into account the concept of heavy drinking but considering it as something not only occasional but also limited to a few hours, which is usually a night, since the sample I will analyze is that of adolescents, for whom this last definition is certainly much more appropriate and more frequent for the most disparate reasons, which I will analyze in more depth in the course of work, such as the celebration of something, the desire to have fun or the desire to try something new even due to peer pressure, the desire to feel older or the hope of forgetting problems for a few hours and reducing the stress. Spread and importance of the phenomenon According to the World Health Organization for the Europe Region (WHO, 2014), alcohol is the sixth cause of illness and premature death in high-income countries and the proof lies in the fact that l 'Europe has the highest level of alcohol consumption in the world, which is mainly driven by some very high consumption rates in Central and Eastern Europe. Going deeper, the percentage of adults who drink alcohol is around 70% and the average annual individual consumption of pure alcohol is around 10.7 litres, with the male portion consuming proportionately more than women, reaching an average male quantity of 19.4 liters per year.Furthermore, alcohol consumption among adolescents represents another serious public health problem in many European countries. According to Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC), a transnational WHO study, in the European Region a fifth of the young population aged 15 years and over shows 'binge' consumption of alcohol for recreational purposes and the rate with which this occurs is the highest in the world (HBSC, 2016). Among adolescents, depending on the different ages, the percentage of alcohol consumption is very different. As can be seen in the graphs below, at the age of 11, the presence of alcohol consumption and weekly drunkenness is quite low, but as the age increases up to 13 or 15 years, the percentage of this phenomenon increases in significant way. Alcohol can harm both short-term use, which is often related to heavy use such as binge episodes and is considered to be the acute effects of drinking, and long-term use, described as the chronic effects. Alcohol is a toxic substance that can damage any organ or system of the human body and can lead to many different underestimated but serious diseases, such as an increasing risk of the appearance of a wide variety of cancers, cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases, gastrointestinal disorders , can affect the development of the fetus with a higher risk of premature birth and low birth weight and can also impact brain development. This last concern is even more worrying when alcohol consumption during adolescence is taken into account, because by negatively affecting the brain, it causes serious consequences on cognitive function and emotional and social development. Analyzing the impact of alcohol on health and deciding to measure it through DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years), alcohol is responsible for 2% of premature deaths and disabilities in women and 12% in men, which makes This drug addiction is one of the highest risk factors for people in the European Union. A DALY can be defined as one year of healthy life lost, and the sum of DALYs of the entire population can be considered as a measurement gap between the current state of health and the ideal situation in which the population lives to an advanced age without diseases and disabilities. Alcohol can also harm other people besides the person who drinks it, and this can happen for example due to violence, domestic violence and road accidents due to the loss of clarity of thought. By analyzing the consequences more deeply, we can better understand the serious consequences of this phenomenon. The use of this substance causes 17,000 deaths per year due to road accidents or a third of all road deaths, 2,000 homicides, 10,000 suicides which represent a sixth of all suicides, 27,000 accidental deaths, 50,000 deaths from cancer, 45,000 deaths from liver cirrhosis and 200,000 episodes of depression (,). It is quite obvious that the greater the extent and frequency of episodes of excessive alcohol consumption, the greater the negative impact on one's life and the greater the likelihood of experiencing one of the previously mentioned diseases or conditions. Among young adolescents the onset of diseases and disabilities is quite low, but as they grow up the rate increases sharply, mainly in relation to road accidents, unprotected sex, psychological problems and alcohol consumption (Gore et al., 2011 ). Suicides, homicides and other accidents are strongly linked to alcohol consumption and since 80% of youth deaths are linked to these causes and not to the appearance of tumors or infections, the presence of powerful interventions will prevent them from drinking so much and often and will strongly reduce the mortality rate among young adults (Carpenter and Dobnik, 2011). Data and samples I use data from the fifth wave of data collection(2011) of the ESPAD (European School Project on Alcohol and other Drugs) survey, which is the largest cross-national research database on substance use among adolescents aged 15 and 16 in the European Union. To carry out this work there was also support from other bodies, such as the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, the European Observatory for Drugs and Drugs of Portugal.Addition (EMCDDA) and the Pompidou Group at the Council of 'Europe, which also financed the participation of researchers from Central and Eastern Europe in the annual Project Meetings. The aim of this project was to collect comparable data on this topic in as many European countries as possible and the long-term goal is to monitor trends and compare those trends within and between countries, which is why the survey is repeated every four years, with 1995 as the starting year. To collect data, a common methodological protocol including also a master questionnaire was established in the early 1990s and for pragmatic reasons was conducted among students in classes. Student participation is voluntary and anonymous with teachers or teaching assistants acting as survey leaders and the results are only presented comprehensively, including all countries involved. All steps are conducted in a standardized way, from the data collection period, which is usually spring, to capture, from cleaning to delivery and final analysis of the collected data, in order to have results that are as comparable as possible. The first wave of the ESPAD survey, in 1995, contained information from 26 countries, while the sixth wave, that of 2011, includes data from 36 countries, with the subsequent collection of results from three additional countries in the autumn of 2011. 2011. As a result, we can safely say that the ESPAD survey now covers more or less the entire European continent, with information in different waves coming from 40 countries. The 2011 samples can be considered nationally representative, with the exception of four cases: in Belgium the survey was conducted only in Flanders, which is the Dutch-speaking part, in Bosnia and Herzegovina it includes only the Republika Srpska , in Germany five of the sixteen Bundesländer are included and in the Russian Federation only the city of Moscow has been incorporated. The overall validity of the results is considered high in most countries, although we have to take into account the different cultural contexts in which the students responded to the questionnaire. Where the size of the country in terms of population allowed, the national sample size was usually close to 2400 participating students, but as can easily be understood, for some smaller countries, that number was higher than the entire student population of the country . desired age, then it would be impossible to reach that sum. Measurement of variables The dependent variable chosen is excessive alcohol consumption. The initial idea for the dependent variable was binge eating (5+ drinks), which comes from the following question “How many times (if any) have you had five or more drinks on one occasion in the last 30 days?”. Subsequently, observing the descriptive statistics and the histogram of that variable (Table 1), it was evident that it was extremely skewed to the right and the possible attempts to try to reduce it were completely unsatisfactory, so the only possible choice was to transform it into a dummy variable and calculates a logistic regression instead of a linear one. The new dummy variable has a value of 0 in the case of absence of binge eating and 1 for the presence of it, regardless of how many times it occurred in the last month. By doing this, I decided to focus minefocus not on the frequency of this phenomenon in my sample, but only on its presence or absence. However, for the purposes of my analysis and considering that my sample is made up of adolescents, analyzing the presence or absence of such excessive alcohol consumption is sufficient and satisfactory because the fact that a 15 year old adolescent in the last 30 days has suffered even in an episode of such behavior is in any case already something to worry about. Independent and control variables The first independent variable that I want to study due to the results of previous studies is the Wealthy family, which according to the questionnaire indicates the perception of well-being of one's family compared to the others and is measured on a scale from 1 – much more affluent, to 7 – much less affluent. The second pair of variables I was interested in was mother's and father's education, which I initially thought might be highly correlated with wealthy family, but looking at the coefficients of the Variance Inflation Factors (VIF), which is a tool for detecting multicollinearity among independent variables, I saw that this was not the case. Furthermore, to avoid the possibility of correlation between the two education variables, I decided to create a single variable called Education, which measures the highest level of education between the two parents, with a scale ranging from 1 – completed elementary school or minus, at 5 – completed college or university and also there was one country, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had no valid values, so I put the results of that country as the missing system. Furthermore, another important independent variable to consider was the average grade in school at the end of the last term, for which Hungary had no values, so I entered them as missing. Furthermore, the variable has results distributed from 1 to 345 with categories from 1 – majority 10, to 7 – majority 4, so I decided to calculate the outliers, with the formula [mean ± 3.5ẟ] and after calculating the interval of confidence, which was [-6.0175;10.835], I decided to leave only the values ​​between 1 and 10, and to make all values ​​greater than 10 a missing system. Furthermore, another independent variable chosen was Friends get drunk, which indicates the number of friends who are estimated to get drunk and is measured on a scale from 1 – none, to 5 – all friends. This variable also has problems regarding a country, which in this specific case is the Netherlands, for which I have put its outputs as a missing system. I initially wanted to also include the Mother and Father variables on drunkenness in my analysis, but looking at the frequency tables it was clear that they had about 60% missing values, certainly too many to include in my regression. Furthermore, there were three variables that were extremely right-skewed relative to their histograms, therefore, to avoid this problem, I transformed them into dummy variables. The first measures how many days the teenager in question has missed school in the last 30 days because he decided to skip or “cut” and varies from 1 – none, to 6 – 7 days or more and what I did was create a dummy with value 0 – never, and 1 – missed a few days. The second variable is Daily Smoking, which measures how often the young adult has smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days, with 1 – indicating not having smoked at all, and 7 – more than 20 cigarettes per day. I transformed it into the smoking dummy variable, which has the value 0 – not smoking and 1 – smoking, without indicating the frequency of this activity. The third is Cannabis life, which evaluates the number of occasions on which the boy/girl has used cannabis during his/her life and is measured on a scale from 1 – never, to 7 – 40 or more. Also in this situation I created a dummy variable, which has the following values, 0 – no cannabis use and 1 – cannabis use. A 1 –.