of alcohol and the consequences thereof, for the sake of simplicity we refer to this latent measure as “alcohol use”. We believe that, for this age group in particular, our measure is driven primarily by the initial alcohol-use AUDIT items and this is borne out by correlations in the range 0.76–0.78 between the derived scale and the items of consumption and frequency of use. Through the inclusion of the other AUDIT items we obtain additional information and hence greater precision. Both of these outcome measures are important to public health and policy. Whilst one, to an extent, is a dichotomised version of the other, there are many precedents to this such as continuous BMI versus dichotomous obesity, or blood pressure and hypertension.
