Lifetime Adversity and Risky Substance Use among Transgender Emerging Adults: Selected Interventions and Clinical Social Work Practice

Abstract

This study investigated multivariate relations between indicators of lifetime adversity and past year risky substance use reported by an Internet-recruited sample of transgender emerging adults from the United States (N = 248, age M = 22.61 years). Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) documented the canonical correlation between canonical variates in this sample (.362), as well as the amount of shared variance (13.1%) between set of variables representing lifetime adversity and past year risky substance use. Examination of the standardized canonical coefficients and structure coefficients highlighted the important contributions of (a) past year drug use and negative consequences of substance use to the synthetic criterion variable and (b) lifetime intimate partner violence to the synthetic predictor variable. Information generated in this study about how specific observed variables contributed to canonical variates may be used to tailor trauma-informed selected interventions in clinical socialwork practice with transgender emerging adults who report substance use problems.