Recent welfare reform policies have targeted problems of substance abuse as a key factor in welfare dependency. These policies have relied upon an extremely weak base of data regarding the overall burden of alcohol and drug problems in U.S. welfare populations, and particularly about the relationships between alcohol problems and welfare dependency. Traditional logistic and linear regression models pose methodological problems when examining service use patterns over time as they are prone to violating statistical assumptions requiring independence of observations. Event history analysis copes with these issues and allows for the incorporation of time-varying explanatory variables (e.g. changes in drinking during prior exit events) in order to assess the role of substance abuse in repeated welfare entries and exits over time. This paper examines the specific techniques that can be utilized in analyses of welfare and substance abuse, and provides methodological examples from a 6-year longitudinal study of welfare recipients. Preliminary results indicate that 50% of welfare exits occurred with 7 months. However, respondent exits that involved alcohol or drug difficulties were substantially more likely to return to welfare. Additional results are presented that assess the role of substance abuse in determining patterns of welfare receipt characterized by short lengths of stay, adverse circumstances at the time of leaving the welfare system, and exits from welfare into unstable employment situations.
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