Relationship between nonstandard work schedule and substance use, new evidence from the NLSY 97

More than one-fifth of all employed Americans work in the evening, at night, or on a rotating shift. Such increasingly common employment that tends to interrupt daily routines, could have important psychological and physiological impacts on the employees. Those health effects might ultimately influence productivity at work, healthcare costs, crime rates and the need for employee assistance programs. The recent reports on the increase in the positive drug use among the American workforce reflected in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2013 together with a September 2014 report by Quest Diagnostics raises suspicions over the association of working at nonstandard schedules and more substance use. Most of the previous studies, however, used non-representative cross sectional data that often suffer from different biases and are unable to track changes and developments in characteristics of the shift workers through time Using 15 consecutive rounds of an American longitudinal dataset for the first time and applying survival analysis in addition to standard panel data techniques to correct for some of the previous problems such as attenuation bias and ‘healthy shift-worker survivor bias’, it turns out in contrast with the past studies’ findings, overall no evidence appear to exist on the relationship between being a shift worker and an increase in substance use and other than the case of cocaine use, almost all other coefficients appear to be negative. Nonetheless none of the correlations imply large effects in absolute terms.