Justification for combining the dependence and three abuse criteria is found in many studies showing undimensionality of the dependence and three abuse criteria for alcohol and drug use disorders. These studies largely used item response theory (IRT) analyses, although other methods were also used (Beseler and Hasin, 2010; Hasin and Beseler, 2009; Hasin et al., 2006c). Participants in these studies were adults in the general population (Beseler and Hasin, 2010; Compton et al., 2009; Hasin et al., 2006c; Kahler and Strong, 2006; Lynskey and Agrawal, 2007; Proudfoot et al., 2006; Saha et al., 2006; Shmulewitz et al., 2010; Teesson et al., 2002) with additional samples of students (Beseler et al., 2010) adolescents (Gelhorn et al., 2008; Martin et al., 2006; Perron et al., 2010; Piontek et al., 2011; Wu et al., 2009b) and emergency room patients (Borges et al., 2010). Among studies that included craving, latent variable modeling showed that craving fit well on a unidimensional latent variable with other DSM-IV alcohol criteria in the U.S. (Keyes et al., 2010) and Australian (Mewton et al., 2011) general population and also
