Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
New research from King's College London suggests that depression and binge-drinking are more common among the female partners of UK military personnel than among comparable women outside the military community.
Researchers from the King's Centre for Military Health Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) collected data from 405 women in military families with at least one child, representing around a third of the military population.
The researchers used a screening tool for depression, rather than a diagnosis from a psychiatrist, and women reporting frequent symptoms were considered to have probable depression. Drinking behaviours were also recorded through a self-reported screening tool.
After controlling for other factors linked to poor alcohol behaviours, the researchers found military partners were twice as likely to binge-drink as women in the general population.
Overall, military partners reported consuming alcohol less frequently than women in the general population but reported binge-drinking more often. Binge-drinking was significantly higher when families were separated for more than 2 months due to deployment.
Military families experience various unique challenges, such as frequently moving location and the stress and separation caused by deployment. The researchers say binge-drinking may reflect poor coping strategies used by military partners during the long absences of serving personnel from the family home.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @08:01AM
It makes sense to compare things to the average to get relative risk. While the general population has it share of teetotaler groups, it also includes alcoholics. Therefore, it is the closest thing you can get to a baseline without having representation problems from trying to subsample groups. Sure, maybe you want to do an oversample of military wives with matched-pair counterparts while controlling for as many confounders as possible and even using within-group differentiation matches to get the best possible picture of independent variables, but this is a relatively quick and easy way to see if there's even a "there" there to warrant further investigation.