Consistent with previous reports (Keyes et al., 2011; Mewton et al., 2011; Proudfoot et al., 2006), which examined 12-month rather than lifetime measures, the psychometric properties of the legal problems criterion were not robust: it had the lowest loading in the factor analysis, and the IRT analysis revealed that is has low discriminatory power but a relatively high difficulty parameter. However, this contrasts with the apparent utility of this criterion from the perspective of assessing familial risk to alcohol problems: another report (Kendler and Myers, in press) found that it was the most consistent predictor of familial risk.
