To date, the IRT-derived severity rankings of the DSM-IV abuse and criteria as measured in the NESARC have not been validated against other indicators of AUD severity; nor have the IRT severity parameters themselves been employed in the creation of severity-weighted AUD scale. Accordingly, this analysis has two objectives. First, it examines the severity ranking of the criteria with multiple correlates of AUD, including consumption, psychological functioning, family history, antisociality and early initiation of drinking, to see if individuals endorsing successively more severe criteria have correspondingly higher values for the correlates (lower in the case of psychological functioning). This is done both before and after controlling for other criteria endorsed, in order to determine whether some criteria are inherently more severe than others or whether apparent differences in severity merely reflect a greater number of positive criteria, i.e., a broader and therefore more severe range of alcohol problems, among individuals endorsing the more severe criteria. Second, it tests whether severity-weighted counts of endorsed criteria are more strongly associated with these AUD correlates than simple unweighted counts of endorsed criteria, in
