Neighborhood effects on drug reporting.
Neighborhood effects on drug reporting.
复制标题
邻里对毒品报告的影响。
DOI：
10.1111/j.1360-0443.2003.00561.x
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Johnson,TimothyP
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Richardson,Jerome;Fendrich,Michael;Johnson,TimothyP
Concerns about the accuracy of self-reported drug use have been raised by recent studies (Harrison and Hughes, 1997). Biological assays used by these studies to validate surveys of self-reported drug use indicate that some individuals report much less than they actually use. In a study of patients in methadone treatment, for example, Magura and colleagues (1987) found that opiates were underreported by 65 percent, benzodiazepine was underreported by 3 percent, and cocaine was underreported by 15 percent. Frendrich et al.(1999) found a large discrepancy between self-reported cocaine use and hair samples collected as part of a general household survey of residents from a high-risk community. Only about 25% of the respondents in this survey who tested positive for cocaine reported that they have ever used cocaine and less than 20% who tested positive for cocaine reported recent use. Similar results were reported by Magura and Kang (1997) with a sample of criminally involved young adults. Hair analysis indicated that about 67 percent of these young adults had probably used cocaine, but only 23 percent had reported cocaine use. Some of the factors which investigators suggest are associated with underreporting are memory failure, fear of legal consequences, and social desirability. Memory failure may occur because the events the respondent is asked to recall are distant in time (Hser, 1997) or the respondent is a heavy user (Harrell, 1997). Fear of legal consequences may be heightened, especially among minorities or other groups who have a history with the law enforcement community. Social desirability may occur in the underreporting of more stigmatized drugs such as heroin or crack cocaine (Harrell, 1997; Magura and Kang, 1997), and is likely to happen when the event is more recent in time (Hser, 1997). Studies of the correlates of underreporting have found that underreporting tends to occur more often for cocaine than other drugs (Fendrich et al., 1999). It is associated with question structure (Klungel et al., 2000), mode of interview (Aquilino, 1994), and characteristics of the interviewer and respondent (Johnson, Fendrich, and Shaligram, 2000). Minorities and criminal justice populations tend to underreport (Fendrich and Xu, 1994). There is also indirect evidence that underreporting occurs more often in interviews performed at home rather than school (Fendrich and Johnson, 2001). While these studies have identified several factors related to underreporting, little attention has been given to the association between underreporting and cultural mistrust, or how this association is affected by broader environmental contexts such as the neighborhood in which a respondent lives. For example, African Americans who live in segregated neighborhoods may be more likely to underreport drug use because segregation intensifies suspicion and mistrust (Allport, 1954), and because there is a long history of mistrust in the African American community toward medical research and medical researchers. Evidence of this mistrust has been well documented in the literature on the participation of African Americans in clinical and public health research (Corbie-Smith et al., 1999; Freimuth et al., 2001; Shavers et al., 2000). The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between underreported drug use and neighborhood racial/ethnic characteristics. In addition, we will examine whether neighborhood characteristics mediate and/or moderate the association between race/ethnicity and underreported use. Our hypothesis is that there is a main effect between neighborhood diversity and underreported use such that residents of segregated …
