Our two main sources were the CDC's 2011 and 2012 Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), an annual survey of Americans' health habits, and the Census Bureau's 2013 County Business Patterns (CBP) program, which tracks the number and size of businesses in counties and metropolitan areas across the country.
We used five total indicators from these data sets to construct our ranking:
- Binge drinking: The percentage of respondents in a metropolitan area who said they had binge drunk in the last month on the BRFSS survey. The survey defines binge drinking for men as having drunk 5 or more drinks on a single occasion, and for women as having had 4 or more drinks on a single occasion.
- Heavy drinking: The percentage of respondents who said they were heavy drinkers on the BRFSS survey. The survey defines heavy drinking for men as having, on average, two or more drinks per day and for women as having, on average, one or more drink per day.
- Number of bars per 100,000 residents: The number of drinking places primarily dedicated to serving alcohol in each metro area, according to the 2013 CBP. This category, and the other establishment-based metrics below, is adjusted by the Census Bureau's estimates of the 2013 population of each metro area to account for the variation in size of America's cities.
- Number of beer, liquor, or wine stores per 100,000 residents: The population-adjusted number of retail stores selling alcoholic beverages for home consumption, from the 2013 CBP.
- Number of alcoholic beverage producing establishments per 100,000 residents: The population-adjusted combined number of breweries, wineries, and distilleries in the metro area, from the 2013 CBP.
BRFSS data were available for 183 metropolitan areas and divisions, and so these were the cities we ranked. The metro areas were ranked in each of the five variables listed above, and to get our final Hangover Index, we averaged those ranks together.