Several reports have been published in which LCAs and related analyses have been conducted on DSM alcohol use disorder criteria. Studies in adult samples have shown that DSM-IV alcohol dependence and abuse criteria can be explained by a single factor that accounts for a majority of the variance in the criteria (Kahler et al., 2006; Krueger et al., 2004; Proudfoot et al., 2006; Saha et al., 2006). The criteria constitute a linear continuum of severity in Rasch (Kahler et al., 2006); IRT (Krueger et al., 2004) and a method testing for discontinuities in the criteria (Hasin and Beseler, 2009). However, in two studies, unidimensionality was not obtained initially. In an adult clinical sample, unidimensionality was reached only after removing tolerance and legal problems (Langenbucher et al., 2004) and in the NESARC, only after removing legal problems (Saha et al., 2006). In an adolescent treatment sample, LCA identified three classes (asymptomatic, mild and severe) representing a continuum of severity (Chung and Martin, 2001). To our knowledge, there are no published studies using LCA to identify homogeneous groups of college drinkers based on DSM-IV criteria.
