Steps were taken to evaluate if, in addition to a direct relationship between First-5 SRE and Time 2 alcohol outcomes, other Time 1 characteristics (e.g., peer drinking) also partially mediated how LR impacted on alcohol problems. For this, sequential multiple mediation pathways were evaluated using a product-of-coefficients test [50] within Mplus, version 5.1 [49] based on a bias-corrected bootstrap test (with 1000 resamples) [51], where at the lower (2.5) and upper (97.5) percentiles reflected the 95% confidence intervals, with mediation occurring if this interval does not include zero. The results of SEMs were evaluated through goodness-of-fit characteristics that included the comparative fit index (CFI) (good values >0.90), the non-normal fit index (NNFI) (good fit = values close to 1.0), the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) (good fit <0.05), and the root mean squared residual (SRMR) (good-fit <0.08) [52-54].
