During the interviews, interviewers rated each SLE’s impact based on the long-term contextual threat (LTCT) concept developed by Brown (1989) using a 4-point rating: minor, low-moderate, high-moderate, and severe. “Long-term” threat was defined as lasting 10 to 14 days or longer after the event, and only such events received a high-moderate or severe rating. “Contextual” was defined as what most people would feel in response to the event given one’s unique history and circumstances. Thus, LTCT ratings were designed to be objective measures of stress and not to reflect participants’ reactions or symptoms that developed after event occurrence. They were found to have moderate interrater reliability (rs = +0.69) and test–retest reliability (rs = +0.60) over a mean period of 4 weeks (see Kendler et al., 1998). In the current analyses, we included only SLE with high-moderate or severe LTCT ratings (e.g., death of a parent) to focus on severe events that would likely have a longer-term impact on drinking than events with minor or low-moderate LTCT ratings (e.g., problems getting along with a neighbor, serious personal crisis of a
