At Alcohol Change UK, we’re really proud of our life-changing Try Dry® behaviour change programme. To date, it’s helped hundreds of thousands of people to successfully cut back on their alcohol consumption, improving their sleep, energy, mood, relationships, productivity, future health risks and all-round happiness. We know that it’s used by people aged from 18 to 105, and from every type of community in the UK, and in 175 nations. And we know it works.
But we are far from complacent, we are committed to being fully inclusive and avoiding making health inequalities worse, by actively removing barriers to participation. To remove barriers, we need to find out where such barriers might exist, and the first step in that is mapping the groups of people for whom Try Dry® engagement might be lower than expected.
So we commissioned Polimapper to analyse fully anonymised UK data from the Try Dry®
app[1]
from 2018 to 2024. We compared this with external datasets, to assess the demographic profiles of those areas that were more likely to sign up to the Try Dry® app. Some of the findings relate to England and Wales only, because census data for Scotland and Northern Ireland are not easily combined with England and Wales data.
Ten main groups of people appear more likely to sign-up to the Try Dry® app:
1. women, compared with men
2. people aged 25-49, compared with those aged under 25 and those aged 50 or older
and people living in local authority areas with:
3. lower levels of income deprivation, compared with areas with higher levels of income deprivation
4. higher levels of employment, compared with areas with higher unemployment
5. higher levels of managerial and professional workers, compared with areas with lower levels of managerial and professional workers
6. higher levels of educational attainment, compared with areas with higher levels of people without qualifications
7. higher levels of people identifying as ‘White’, compared with areas with higher levels of people identifying as ‘Black’ or ‘Asian’; with this finding more pronounced for people joining the programme during the Dry January® challenge (in December or January), compared with people joining the programme during the rest of the year
8. higher levels of female admissions to hospital for alcohol, compared with areas with lower levels of these admissions (especially well correlated with sign-ups during the Dry January® challenge)
9. higher levels of ‘higher risk’ alcohol consumers (defined by AUDIT-C score of 8-10), compared with areas with higher levels of ‘increasing risk’ alcohol consumers (AUDIT-C score of 5-7)
10. higher levels of ex-smokers, compared with areas with higher levels of current smokers.
It is important to emphasise three things about these findings:
a) findings 3 to 10 are based on comparisons between aggregate data for local authority areas and Try Dry® sign-ups rates in those areas, not analysis at the level of individual people
b) although all these correlations are statistically significant, some are weaker and some are stronger
c) all findings are correlations only and do not imply causation.
It’s also useful to note that there was no statistically significant correlation between levels of sign-ups to the Try Dry® app and areas with high levels of:
- economic inactivity
- people aged 65 or over
- people in Very Good Health, or Very Bad Health
- people defined as disabled by the Equality Act
- digital exclusion, measured by broadband speeds and 5G availability
- hospital admissions for alcohol.
Finally it is useful to note that there were no statistically significant regional differences in the level of usage or effectiveness of the Try Dry® app for its users, despite significant regional differences in sign-up rates. This indicates that, even if the programme doesn’t yet reach everyone equally, its patterns of usage and effectiveness are evenly spread across the population. It doesn’t work for everyone, of course, but it works for most people; and early indications are that the answer to the question ‘who does it and doesn’t it work for?’ appears unrelated to different socio-demographic groups.
There are two main reasons why we might have fewer Try Dry® sign-ups in an area:
- that area contains more people who are experiencing barriers to engagement with the programme
- that area has lower levels of need for the programme.
This research is about mapping patterns of engagement and did not investigate why there might be lower levels in some areas. We cannot draw firm conclusions about the reasons from this research, so below we share possible or likely implications, rather than any certainty.
For three of the ten positive correlations, it’s likely that actual barriers to engagement do exist.
- Finding 1. Amongst the wider population, there are more men than women experiencing alcohol harm (drinking at hazardous or harmful levels), but more women than men are engaging in our Try Dry® programme. We have much work to do to reach out to the millions of men who would benefit from the programme.
- Finding 2. Second, amongst the wider population, people aged over 50 are experiencing alcohol harm at higher levels than people under 50, but this older group is somewhat under-represented in the programme. We need to better engage this older group.
- Finding 10. Third, ex-smokers are a previously unidentified group who might be worth us more proactively reaching out to.
Findings 3 to 7 are likely to be linked to the fact that areas with lower levels of hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption would naturally be expected to have less need for our Try Dry® programme, with lower sign-up levels.
- For example, the research shows that Black and Asian populations, on average, have lower levels of alcohol consumption than White populations. So finding 7 might well be related to the fact that, in those areas with higher Black and Asian populations, there is less need for the Try Dry® programme in the first place, and so lower levels of Try Dry® sign-up.
- Likewise, areas with lower deprivation (finding 3), higher employment (finding 4), more people in managerial roles (finding 5) and fewer people without qualifications (finding 6), are all likely to be inter-related (people with higher qualifications gaining managerial roles, earning higher salaries and living in areas with less deprivation); and there is good evidence[2] that people who are better off, on average, consume more alcohol – and vice versa. So those areas with higher deprivation (including fewer people in employment and in managerial roles, and more people without qualifications) are also likely to have lower average levels of alcohol consumption and fewer people who need the Try Dry® programme. Lower Try Dry® sign-up levels in these areas do not necessarily indicate a problem of engagement.
- Areas with higher levels of Black and Asian populations also have, on average, higher levels of deprivation, which indicates that findings 3-6 and finding 7 might therefore be telling us the same story, not separate stories.
Of course, while different levels of need may explain findings 3 to 7, we cannot assume that, and there may be other factors at play. For example, previous research has shown that lower levels of educational qualifications, poverty and older age contribute to digital exclusion. Lower overall levels of consumption among Black and Asian populations does not mean there is no alcohol harm in these communities, and our research has shown that stigma and discrimination can act as a barrier to support for alcohol problems among ethnically minoritised groups. Similarly, while those of us living in more deprived areas may consume less alcohol overall, hospital admissions and deaths caused by alcohol are higher than among those of us living in more affluent areas. Further research is needed to understand more about the degree to which lower Try Dry® engagement in these areas is related to barriers to engagement, lower levels of need, both, or other possible factors.
Finding 8, about higher level of female admissions to hospital for alcohol, is likely to be related to finding 1 – two findings telling a similar story.
Finding 9 is not unexpected. People drinking in the so-called increasing risk category are less likely to see themselves as drinking alcohol in a problematic way, whereas people in the higher risk category are more likely to be at a point where alcohol is causing issues, and more likely to take action to try to resolve that. Looking into this a little more, we analysed the alcohol consumption profile from Try Dry® baseline sign-up data, for the UK from 2022, and compared it with the alcohol consumption profile of the adult population (for England) from the Health Survey for the same year.[3]
Women drinking alcohol at 'increasing' risk levels (15-35 units a week) make up 11% of the female population, but 47% of female Try Dry® sign-ups.
Women drinking alcohol at higher risk levels (Above 35+ units a week) are 4% of the female population, but a huge 34% of female Try Dry® sign-ups.
