Effects of Economic Disruptions on Alcohol Use and Problems: Why Do African Americans Fare Worse?

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Objective:This study tested a model of the effects of recession-related job loss on alcohol use disorder (AUD) and examined why African Americans who lost their jobs during the 2008-2009 recession were at increased risk for AUD relative to Whites. We hypothesized that (a) job loss would be positively associated with psychological distress (i.e., higher levels of depressive symptoms) and increased drunkenness, and (b) low levels of family social support and experiences of racial stigma would exacerbate the effects of job loss on distress, especially among African Americans and Hispanics. Method: Data were drawn from the 2010 U.S. National Alcohol Survey (NAS), a crosssectional survey of the U.S. general population. Using data from the 2010 NAS (telephone survey of 1,111 African American, 964 Hispanic, and 3,133 White adults), we conducted simultaneous path modeling in Mplus to test mediation and moderation hypotheses. Our key outcome was AUD as measured by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Results: Recession-related job loss was significantly associated with AUD through its effects on increased drunkenness, and the associations were positive for Whites, stronger for African Americans than Whites, and nonexistent for Hispanics. Job loss was associated with distress in the overall sample, and distress was positively associated with drunkenness among African Americans only, suggesting that distress is another pathway by which job loss affects AUD among African Americans. Higher levels of family social support mitigated the effects of job loss on psychological distress, and this relationship did not differ by race/ethnicity. Conclusions: During economic downturns, increased stress and heavy drinking are important pathways through which recession-related job loss can lead to greater AUD among African Americans relative to Whites. (J. Stud. Alcohol Drugs, 77, 261-271, 2016)

Intimate Partner Violence Among Low-Income Fathers: Testing a Stress-Coping Model

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Poor, persecuted, young, and alone: Toward explaining the elevated risk of alcohol problems among Black and Latino men who drink

“…Alcohol problem measures have been used in the NAS since 1990 (Caetano and Tam, 1995). Many studies have been published using the NAS dependence measure, and findings reveal the expected associations with demographic variables (e.g., age, gender), total volume, and heavy drinking (Bond et al, 2014; Caetano and Tam, 1995; Greenfield et al, 2014a, 2014b; Jones-Webb et al, in press) as well as health services utilization (Cherpitel and Ye, 2015) and substance abuse treatment utilization (Zemore et al, 2009). Additionally, this measure has been associated with other alcohol problem measures such as the RAPS4 and AUDIT (Nayak et al, 2009) and compared favorably to dependence items in the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (Karriker-Jaffe et al, 2015).…”

Protective Factors as an Explanation for the “Paradox” of Black–White Differences in Heavy Drinking

“…national surveys generally show lower heavy drinking prevalence among African Americans compared to Whites, as well as less intense binge drinking (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2013). Researchers have been perplexed by this and by African Americans’ lower lifetime rates of substance use and other psychiatric disorders, given their greater exposure to social and economic adversity and well-established links between adversity, psychological distress and heavy drinking (Jones-Webb, Karriker-Jaffe, Zemore, & Mulia, 2016; Mulia, Schmidt, Bond, Jacobs, & Korcha, 2008; Zemore, Karriker-Jaffe, Keithly, & Mulia, 2011). Such findings are considered to be an “epidemiologic paradox” (K.…”