Federal Study: Are Non-Heterosexual Women Drinking Too Much?

Non-heterosexual women may be drinking too much and the National Institute of Health wants to stop that.

The NIH gave $210,776 to Loyola Marymount University to study such female Facebook users in Los Angeles through an “inviting, Facebook-connected, social game.”

The study, titled, “A Novel, Gamified, Facebook-Integrated Personalized Normative Feedback Intervention to Reduce Alcohol Use and Negative Consequences among Sexual Minority Women” seeks to find ways to prevent heavy drinking among this group.

“Sexual minority women in the United States are more likely to drink alcohol, engage in heavy drinking, and experience alcohol-related problems than are heterosexual women,” the NIH grant summary says. “Yet, to date, no evidence-based intervention or prevention efforts have been developed to reduce alcohol consumption in female sexual minority community settings.”

This study set out to “narrow the disparity in alcohol intervention research” by considering an innovative intervention to lower drinking in the sexual minority women community who use Facebook, looking at their peers’ general alcohol use and whether they’re drinking to cope with sexual minority stigma.

Using Facebook, itself an alternate reality, to host a game to study people’s real-life behavior sounds less like a scientific study and more like a waste of $210,776.

The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.