An Analysis of Worker Drug Use and Workplace Policies and Programs

CHAPTER 4: CURRENT ILLICIT DRUG AND HEAVY ALCOHOL USE BY OCCUPATION

In addition to indicating the size of the establishment at which they worked, NHSDA respondents also provided information on their primary job—type of work, job title, specific duties, and the type of business or industry in which they worked. From this information respondents were coded into one of the fourteen occupational categories listed in Table 4.1. Thus establishment size and occupation are the two workplace characteristics employed in these analyses. The occupation categories correspond to those used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1987) with two important exceptions. First, the category Service occupations is divided in this report into three groups: Protective Service; Food Preparation, Waitstaff, and Bartenders; and Other Service. These groups are used since analysis with earlier years of the NHSDA indicated that there was substantial variation in drug use rates among these three groups of service workers (Hoffmann et al., 1996). Second, information is not provided on workers in Farming, Fishing, and Forestry since there were too few respondents in this occupation category to yield accurate estimates.

This page was last updated on June 03, 2008.

SAMHSA, an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, is the Federal Government's lead agency for improving the quality and availability of substance abuse prevention, addiction treatment, and mental health services in the United States.