In summary, the current results converge with other recent efforts in depicting a developmental course of alcoholism progression with potentially important clinical implications. However, further analysis suggested that severity scores from this latent trait did not generally increment additive scores from other measures of alcoholic severity. Furthermore, the trait was comparably predictive regardless of the degree to which participants were traited. Overall, results suggest the need for further research on the potential for IRT to depict alcohol severity as a latent trait.
