Of the moderators tested, the relationship described in the literature between alcohol use and stressful life events was the most tenuous (Veenstra et al., 2006). Using the raw alcohol use variable, we found (in the bivariate model) that potentially stressful life events only significantly moderated the environmental influences on the raw alcohol use variable, with the moderating effect on genetic influences yielding a trending effect (p = 0.07). Using the transformed variable, we found (in the both the bivariate and the extended univariate models) that potentially stressful life events significantly moderated the genetic and shared environmental influences on the transformed variable. Similar to our findings with the raw variable, Button et al. (2008) found that negative life events moderated the influence of unique environmental factors but not additive genetic or shared environmental factors on externalizing behavior. However, Hicks et al. (2009) found that stressful life events moderated additive genetic, shared environmental, and unique environmental influences on externalizing behavior (including alcohol use), which is similar to our findings with the transformed variable. Although both the raw and transformed results are consistent
