Deployment and Alcohol Use in a Military Cohort: Use of Combined Methods to Account for Exposure-Related Covariates and Heterogeneous Response to Exposure.

ABSTRACT: Studies have shown that combat-area deployment is associated with increases in alcohol use; however, studying the influence of deployment on alcohol use faces 2 complications. First, the military considers a confluence of factors before determining whether to deploy a service member, creating a nonignorable exposure and unbalanced comparison groups that inevitably complicate inference about the role of deployment itself. Second, regression analysis assumes that a single effect estimate can approximate the population's change in postdeployment alcohol use, which ignores previous studies that have documented that respondents tend to exhibit heterogeneous postdeployment drinking behaviors. Therefore, we used propensity score matching to balance baseline covariates for the 2 comparison groups

SUBMITTER: Fink DS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5860008 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature