Family History of Alcoholism: Family history of alcohol problems was assessed using the Family History Assessment Module (FHAM) and the Individual Assessment Module (IAM) of the FHAM (Janca et al., 1997). FHAM measures psychiatric disorders including alcohol dependence based on information from relatives. It has a specificity of up to 97% among siblings and offspring implicated of dependence (Rice et al, 1995). Participants indicated the number of first and second degree biological relatives that were diagnosed with alcohol dependence. If one or more relatives were implicated as alcohol dependent, participants were designated as family history positive. Among the family history positive, a second variable, family history density (FHD) was adapted from Stoltenberg and colleagues weighting of family history measures (Stoltenberg et al., 1998). First degree alcohol dependent relatives (parents and siblings) were assigned a score of 0.5, alcoholic second degree relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) were assigned a score of 0.25, and all other relatives were assigned a score of 0. FHD was then computed from the sum of these weights per participant.
