but the protective relationship in Whites extended to ‘ever drinking’ and ‘first alcohol use prior to age 18’. The modeling of the relationships between monozygotic and dizygotic twins allows for the variance in and covariance between alcohol involvement and religious attendance to be decomposed into underlying latent genetic and environmental mechanisms. Findings suggest distinct mechanisms for the relationships between religious attendance and alcohol involvement in African American and White women. A notable strength of this study is that it was conducted in the largest cohort of African American twin pairs available, although the proportion of White female twin pairs (85% of the 3,787 total) was considerably larger.
