Abstract
Background: Although sexual minority women (SMW) are at increased risk of hazardous drinking (HD), efforts to validate HD measures have yet to focus on this population. Objectives: Validation of a 13-item Hazardous Drinking Index (HDI) in a large sample of SMW. Methods: Data were from 700 adult SMW (age 18-82) enrolled in the Chicago Health and Life Experiences of Women study. Criterion measures included counts of depressive symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, average daily and 30-day ethanol consumption, risky sexual behavior, and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) measures of alcohol abuse/dependence. Analyses included assessment of internal consistency, construction of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to predict alcohol abuse/dependence, and correlations between HDI and criterion measures. We compared the psychometric properties (diagnostic accuracy and correlates of hazardous drinking) of the HDI to the commonly used CAGE instrument. Results: KR-20 reliability for the HDI was 0.80, compared to 0.74 for the CAGE. Predictive accuracy, as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for alcohol abuse/dependence, was HDI: 0.89; CAGE: 0.84. The HDI evidenced the best predictive efficacy and tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity. Results supported the concurrent validity of the HDI measure. Conclusions: The Hazardous Drinking Index is a reliable and valid measure of hazardous drinking for sexual minority women.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 43-51 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Substance Use and Misuse |
Volume | 52 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Hazardous drinking
- alcohol abuse
- alcohol dependence
- sexual minority women
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Medicine (miscellaneous)
- Health(social science)
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
- Psychiatry and Mental health