Lifetime income patterns and alcohol consumption: Investigating the association between long-and short-term income trajectories and drinking

Lifetime patterns of income may be an important driver of alcohol use. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between long-term and short-term measures of income and the relative odds of abstaining, drinking lightly-moderately and drinking heavily. We used data from the US Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), a national population-based cohort that has been followed annually or biannually since 1968. We examined 3111 adult respondents aged 30-44 in 1997. Latent class growth mixture models with a censored normal distribution were used to estimate income trajectories followed by the respondent families from 1968 to 1997, while repeated measures multinomial generalized logit models estimated the odds of abstinence (no drinks per day) or heavy drinking (at least 3 drinks a day), relative to light/moderate drinking (