Measuring Current Drug Use in Female Sex Workers and Their Noncommercial Male Partners in Mexico: Concordance Between Data Collected from Surveys vs Semi-Structured Interviews
BACKGROUND:
Self-reports
are commonly used to assess prevalence and frequency of drug use, but it is
unclear whether qualitative methods like semi-structured interviews are as
useful at obtaining such information as quantitative surveys.
OBJECTIVES:
This
study compared drug use occurrence and frequency using data collected from
quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. We also examined whether
combining data from both sources could result in significant increases in percentages
of current users and whether the concordance between the two sets of data was
associated with the type of drug use, age, gender and socioeconomic status.
METHODS:
Self-
reports of recent marijuana, heroin, crack, cocaine, crystal/methamphetamine, inhalant, and
tranquilizer use were collected using both methods from a cohort of Mexican
female sex workers and their non-commercial male partners (n = 82).
RESULTS:
Participants
were significantly less likely to report marijuana, cocaine and tranquilizer use and frequency of use
during the qualitative interviews than during the quantitative surveys.
Agreement on frequency of drug use was excellent for crystal/methamphetamine,
heroin and inhalant use, and weak for cocaine, tranquilizers and marijuana use. Older
participants exhibited significantly higher concordance than younger
participants in reports of marijuana and methamphetamine use. Higher monthly
income was significantly associated with higher concordance in crack use but lower concordance with marijuana use.
CONCLUSIONS:
Although
use of such data can result in an underreporting of drug use, qualitative data
can be quantified in certain circumstances to triangulate and confirm the
results from quantitative analyses and provide a more comprehensive view of
drug use.
- 1 School of Social Work , University of Southern California , Los Angeles , California , USA.
- 2 Community Health Sciences , Boston University , Boston , Massachusetts , USA.
- 3 Anthropology, The Ohio State University , Columbus , Ohio , USA.
- 4 Psychiatry, University of California , San Diego, La Jolla , California , USA.
- 5 School of Medicine , University of California , Davis, Sacramento , California , USA.
- 6 El Colegio de la Frontera Norte , Tijuana , Mexico.
- 7 Federacion Mexicana de Asociaciones Privadas , Cuidad Juarez , Mexico.
- 8 Division of Global Public Health , University of California , San Diego, La Jolla , California , USA.
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