Research articleHealth Indicators for Military, Veteran, and Civilian Women
Section snippets
Methods
Data were used from the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a national telephone survey conducted annually to monitor health conditions and risk behaviors of U.S. adults.16 The survey uses state-level sampling plans and weighting to obtain a representative sample from the population of households with telephones within each state. Each respondent is assigned a final sampling weight based on his or her probability of selection and a post-stratification factor to ensure that
Results
All demographic characteristics were associated with military status, except marital status (Table 1). Active duty women were younger, and both active duty and National Guard or Reserves (NG/R) women were less likely to be Caucasian than civilian and veteran women. Active duty and veteran women were more highly educated, had higher incomes, and were more likely to live in the Southern U.S. than civilians. NG/R women were more likely to live in the Midwest than the other three groups.
Discussion
This article is the first to present population-based estimates of multiple health indicators by military status for women across the U.S. Veterans reported consistently poorer health compared with the other three groups, including poorer general health, greater likelihood of health risk behaviors (e.g., smoking), and greater likelihood of chronic conditions and mental health disorders. For two indicators only—health insurance and clinical breast exams—veterans reported faring better than
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