A sample of 1,003 women, age 22 in 1983-84 and age 27 in 1988-89, were selected from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Personal, familial, and geopolitical predictors of alcohol consumption were evaluated at each time period and longitudinally. The study integrated macro- and micro-level influences to determine their influence on individual alcohol consumption. Personal and familial were most influential. Availability of alcohol and political economy had little effect on consumption. Mother's history of alcohol abuse was more important than father's. At age 22 education, being married, and having children reduced consumption, as did a prior affiliation with a religion that proscribed the use of alcohol reduced consumption. At age 27 education, being married, and children decreased consumption, but religious affiliation and parent's consumption were not significant. While marital status at age 22 reduced drinking at that age, it lead to greater consumption at age 27. / Graduation date: 1995

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No description available.

Research on the female alcoholic indicates that women drink for different reasons than men. Rather than being a product of role conflict as it is in males, female alcoholism is frequently precipitated by stress, particularly marital stress. For exploratory purposes a group of women seen at a public alcoholism treatment clinic were divided into four categories: 1) Non-alcoholic wives of alcoholic men; 2) alcoholic wives of non-alcoholic men; 3) single alcoholic women; 4) alcoholic wives of alcoholic men. These groups were compared. for amount of personality disorganization, using the total number of abnormal scales on the clinical profiles of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a personality test administered at the beginning of treatment. The investigator hypothesized that the alcoholic wives of alcoholics would demonstrate the most dysfunction, due to the unstabilizing effects of the alcoholic husband and the stress of marital interaction between two disorganized personalities. In contrast, the alcoholic woman married to the non-alcoholic husband would experience less stress and consequently less personality dysfunction without the problems created by an alcoholic husband. The dysfunction of the single alcoholic women was hypothesized to fall between the two marital categories and the dysfunction of the non-alcoholic wives of alcoholic males was hypothesized to be the least among the four categories, since these wives have been shown to have essentially normal personalities which become disorganized by their husbands' alcoholic episodes. As hypothesized, the non-alcoholic wives showed the least amounts of personality disorganization, but the alcoholic women showed an inverse relationship to the hypothesized order of dysfunction, i.e. the alcoholic women married to non-alcoholic men were most disorganized, according to numbers of abnormal MMPI scales, followed by single alcoholic women and then the alcoholic wives of alcoholic men. The differences among the alcoholic groups disappeared, though, when age was held constant, except in the group of older alcoholic women, where the inverse relationship remained. The results of this study raise questions about the adaptive and maladaptive used of alcohol within a marriage situation and the subsequent effects on personality.

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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

In this study marital status and the alcoholism or non-alcoholism of the spouse are hypothesized to be important factors affecting the female alcoholic's personality and treatability.

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At present, there is speculation that women's alcohol use is a growing biomedical concern. Whilst not dismissing the potential health problems from excessive alcohol use by women that the evidence suggests, this thesis does not necessarily take the view that women's alcohol use/abuse is merely a reflection of a biomedical concern. Drawing predominantly from feminist tools of analysis, this thesis examines the discourse of alcohol use/abuse and reveals that mainstream interpretations of the epidemiological evidence are informed by an underlying sexism inherent in the research process itself. However, it is also argued that although popular interpretations can be contested on the grounds of sexism, there is a significant body of evidence that suggests women suffer more alcohol-related biological harm than men do. Given that epidemiological researchers are evidently observing something organically manifest, something perfectly correlative with the popular representation of a female vulnerability to alcohol related harm, this investigation cannot be reduced to the realm of cultural analysis and interpretation. The question then emerges, how can cultural assumptions that guide interpretations of the evidence become biologically manifest? Upon deeper reflection, this investigation turns its attention to relations of power and reveals the biological body and the discourses that produce it to be more closely aligned than generally presumed. This thesis argues that nature (the body) and culture (discourse) are not inherently oppositional, thus, the way we "conceptualise" the world must be inseparable from the "matter" under investigation. Based on this revelation, it is reasonable to consider that normalising discourse, which founds the meaning-making process of alcohol use, is not simply a re-presentation of the natural/organic world, but is constitutive of, and inherently writing the biological world it describes. Thus, rather than erecting material/conceptual borders that reinforce the polarisation of the nature/culture division, this thesis proposes a way to think difference more generously, in a way that allows for a closer reconciliation of the historical division between the "theory" and the "lived" experience.

Much empirical evidence attests to a strong relationship between the panic-related disorders and alcoholism. Recent data suggest that anxiety sensitivity (fear of anxiety) may be one common underlying vailable contributing to the large degree of overlap between the panic-related disorders and alcoholism. In fact, some data indicate that the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and alcohol misuse may be particularly strong in women, a group which is generally underrepresented in the alcoholism etiology literature. Research described in this thesis was conducted with the aim of further elucidating the nature of the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and alcohol use/abuse in young adult women. The series of seven experiments included in this thesis demonstrated that: (1) high levels of anxiety sensitivity are characteristic of subjects meeting diagnostic criteria for panic disorder, an anxiety disorder frequently associated with alcohol abuse; (2) female university students demonstrate significantly higher average levels of anxiety sensitivity than male university students; (3) anxiety sensitivity is an important predictor of self-reported rates of alcohol consumption in university women; (4) high anxiety sensitive university students are both more likely to report drinking alcohol primarily to "cope" with negative emotional states, and less likely to report drinking alcohol primarily for social-affiliative motives, than are low anxiety sensitive university students; (5) high anxiety sensitive women display greater degrees of sober subjective-emotional arousal when anticipating aversive stimulation, greater degrees of sober electrodermal reactivity to the aversive stimulation, and greater sensitivity to the dampening effects of alcohol on these measures of reactivity, than low anxiety sensitive controls; (6) high anxiety sensitive women show a sober attentional bias favoring the processing of physically threatening information, which is dampened through th