The Impact of Alcohol Misuse and Intellectual Disability on Occupational Safety

Abstract

In the United States, people with disabilities have the right to live and work in the least restrictive environments possible based on their needs. However, workers with intellectual disabilities struggle with shortcomings in both intellectual ability and adaptive capacity which can put them at higher risk for occupational injury particularly if they also cannot recognize how their own behaviors such as binge drinking might impact that risk at work. The objective of this research was to discover if disability status and/or disability type had an effect on binge drinking in the state of Minnesota when controlling for age, sex(m/f), and race. Data from the 2018 Minnesota Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System was utilized for this study. Negative binomial regression analysis revealed that there was no statistical significance related to disability status or disability type. However, both sex and age were statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. Similar to other research, this result found that younger men in general including those with disabilities were more likely to binge drink than women and people in any other age group. Occupational safety implications include offering alcohol misuse counseling services in the work setting, screening for off-hours alcohol use routinely as a part of occupational accident investigations, and encouraging workers to seek support when feeling pressured to binge drink during social situations.