Opioid misuse and family structure: Changes and continuities in the role of marriage and children over two decades.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The opioid crisis is widely felt in the United States. Scholarly attention to the crisis focuses on macro-level processes and largely neglects meso-level explanations such as family structure for opioid use behaviors. We hypothesize that married adults and adults with coresident children are at lower risk of misusing prescription pain relievers (PPR), using heroin, and using needles to inject heroin relative to adults from other family structures.

Method

We used National Survey on Drug Use and Health data from 2002-2018 to test our hypotheses with multivariable logistic regression.

Results

We found that married adults have a lower predicted probability of each opioid use behavior relative to nonmarried adults across the study period. We also found that the

SUBMITTER: Chapman A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8126995 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature