Including unfair treatment in the model (model 2) brought about some reductions in black-white differences in social consequences and dependence symptoms, but these were relatively modest. There was generally little effect observed for poverty (model 1). One exception related to the risk for dependence among those reporting little or no heavy drinking. Table 5 shows that when poverty was added to the base model, black drinkers’ elevated risk for dependence was substantially reduced (from an AOR of 5.73 in the base model to 4.36 in model 1), and a similar reduction was seen for Hispanics (AOR decreased from 3.51 to 2.36). We viewed this finding with caution, however, as 12% of the current drinker sample were missing income data, and were thus excluded from our analyses of the role of poverty. A sensitivity analysis was performed to re-estimate the AOR for race/ethnicity in the base model after excluding all cases missing on poverty. The new estimates based on this truncated sample did not affect our results for black-white differences. That is, poverty still appeared to partially account for the black-white
