Substance abuse and mental health disparities: Comparisons across sexual identity groups in a national sample of young Australian women
Section snippets
Study participants
The sample includes participants from the youngest cohort in the ALSWH, a prospective study that began in 1996 with the goal of tracking the health of women in three age cohorts (aged 18–23, 45–50 and 70–75 at baseline) for at least 20 years. We chose to focus on the youngest cohort because it was the only age cohort in which both illicit drug use and sexual identity was assessed. The ALSWH research team randomly selected the sample from the database of Medicare Australia, the universal
Sample characteristics
Each of the demographic characteristics of the sample differed significantly by sexual identity (see Table 1). Women who identified as exclusively heterosexual were most likely to be married (44.0%), to have children (32.8%), to have incomes of $37,000/year or more (66.5%) and to live in rural or remote areas (40.4%). Those who identified as lesbian were significantly older (M = 27.5, SD = 1.4) than women in the other three sexual identity groups (F(3, 7605) = 2.98, p = .03), and were most
Discussion
Findings of higher rates on almost all measures of substance use among sexual minority women compared with exclusively heterosexual women support our first hypothesis and are consistent with previous population-based studies from New Zealand (Fergusson et al., 2005), the Netherlands (Sandfort, deGraf, Bijl, & Schnabel, 2001) and the U.S. (Gilman et al., 2001). Patterns of substance use are also consistent with an earlier (wave 2) survey of the ALWHS young cohort (Hillier et al., 2003) and
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association’s Lesbian Health Fund in the United States. The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health is conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Newcastle and the University of Queensland. We are grateful to the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing for funding the study, and to the women who participated.
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