NCJ Number
192830
Journal
Substance Use & Misuse Volume: 36 Issue: 14 Dated: 2001 Pages: 2043-2063
Date Published
2001
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This study focused on the comparative presence of sexual harassment, workplace abuse, and drinking outcomes in medical residents and graduate students at an American urban university.
Abstract
The hypothesis was that the medical student population would report more abusive and harassing experience than the graduate student population. Data were obtained from a mail survey. The sample was divided by gender and occupation. The final wave 1 sample consisted of 2,492 employees. One year later, these respondents were re-surveyed. Findings indicated a high prevalence of training-related sexual harassment and generalized workplace abuse within medical training programs. Comparative data looking at medical residents vs. graduate students found female medical residents had greater odds of experiencing sexual harassment (including sexual coercion) and generalized workplace abuse (including verbal aggression, disrespectful behavior, and isolation/exclusion) than female graduate students. While male residents and graduate students showed no significant differences in experiencing sexual harassment during training, male medical residents did show greater odds of experiencing generalized workplace abuse (including verbal aggression) than their graduate student counterparts. In contrast to previous research suggesting that the medical field had higher drinking rates than the general population, data showed that male graduate students had higher rates on certain drinking indicators than their medical resident counterparts. The drinking indicators were drinking to escape, number of days drank, greatest amount drank per day, as well as heavy episodic drinking. The relatively less stringent time demands of the graduate student training program may be more conducive to promoting social drinking behaviors which can also lead to more problematic drinking patterns in response to abusive training-related experiences. Female medical residents showed substantially greater odds of problem drinking than female graduate students. While these findings linked generalized workplace abuse with deleterious drinking behaviors in graduate students, sexual harassment has become the more publicized of the two. Perhaps legal definitions of workplace abuse would aid in regulating these behaviors in the workplace. 5 tables, 44 references