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The tools we have to understand what is happening to the economy are becoming distorted or harder to interpret.

The U.S. government is trying to build, at great speed, a three-legged stool to prevent long-lasting economic depression from the Coronavirus outbreak

Race differences in school attendance across the Jim Crow South and its implications for Black-White disparities in cognitive impairment risk among older adults

Parents’ Valuation of Approving a Child’s Spouse in a Context of Marital Change

Housing Providers, Policy, and Health Inequities

"Come, we try" - A qualitative study of changing marital practices in low-income settings in Eastern Africa and the implications for maternal and child health

Webinar - will be recorded

PURPOSE: We aimed to estimate latent classes of concurrent polysubstance use and test for sexual orientation differences in latent class memberships with representative data from adolescents living in 19 U.S. states. We also tested whether sex, race/ethnicity, and age moderated the sexual identity differences in polysubstance use class memberships. METHODS: We analyzed data from 119,437 adolescents from 19 states who participated in the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Latent class analysis characterized polysubstance use patterns based on self-reported frequency of lifetime and past-month use of alcohol (including heavy episodic drinking), tobacco (cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco), and marijuana. Multinomial logistic regression models tested differences in latent class memberships by sexual identity. Interaction terms tested whether sex, race/ethnicity, and age moderated the sexual identity differences in polysubstance use class memberships. RESULTS: A six-class model of polysubstance use fit the data best and included nonusers (61.5%), experimental users (12.2%), marijuana-alcohol users (14.8%), tobacco-alcohol users (3.8%), medium-frequency three-substance users (3.6%), and high-frequency three-substance users (4.1%). Gay/lesbian- and bisexual-identified adolescents had significantly higher odds than heterosexual-identified adolescents of being in all of the user classes compared with the nonuser class. These sexual identity differences in latent polysubstance use class memberships were generally larger for females than for males, varied occasionally by race/ethnicity, and were sometimes larger for younger ages. CONCLUSION: Compared with their heterosexual peers, gay/lesbian and bisexual adolescents-especially females-are at heightened risk of engaging in multiple types of polysubstance use. Designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions will likely reduce these sexual orientation disparities.

Completeness of Abortion Reporting in Three National Surveys in the United States

Early Life Course Exposure to Family Instability and Adult Health