Shedding light on some of the details of that picture can help the design and targeting of policies to tackle the harms associated with alcohol consumption. The results of analyses of alcohol consumption in 20 OECD countries were presented in the previous sections of this paper. Analyses were conducted on the basis of individual-level alcohol consumption data from multiple waves of national health and lifestyle surveys, and included the identification of trends over time in overall drinking and in measures of hazardous and heavy episodic alcohol drinking, as well as regression-based analyses of social disparities in drinking patterns and the calculation of concentration indexes for individual countries.