Citation

Marshal MP, Friedman MS, Stall RON, Chung T, King K. Addiction 2008; 103(8): 1405.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1360-0443.2008.02309.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Our meta-analysis offers strong theoretical and empirical evidence for higher rates of substance use in lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) youth that was consistent across: (a) large and small-sample studies, (b) multiple types of drugs and patterns of drug use, (c) multiple operational definitions of homosexuality, and (d) multiple diagnostic tests of the statistical conclusion validity of the results, including outlier analyses. In addition to this robust set of findings we noted a ‘trend’ such that the effect sizes that were associated with ‘hard’ drugs appeared larger than those associated with more common drugs. But this was not an a priori hypothesis, and by no means a central finding of our study. In fact it was described (conservatively) in the context of other effects that seemed to defy the trend. For example, the effect size for lifetime cigarette use was larger than the effect size for cocaine or composite measures of hard drugs. As we noted in the original paper, the observed variability across the different types of drugs ‘may account for some of the observed heterogeneity of effects in the overall model’.