to the heavy drinking risk. Third, this paper only tested one model of how LR might relate to adverse alcohol outcomes and alternative models may have done equally well in accounting for the interrelationships of variables. Fourth, the current data involve cross-sectional analyses, and, thus, the results of any mediational analyses should be considered preliminary until prospective studies are carried out. The cross-sectional approach was needed to optimize the number of subjects for the current analyses; while a prior ALSPAC paper reported data for early-onset drinkers (Schuckit et al., 2008a), that sample did not have the full set of potential mediators to allow for an optimal prospective evaluation. Fifth, the model could not evaluate the impact of peer drinking alone, and used a proxy measure of the number of substances reported to have been used by peers, while the alcohol expectancy measure used an abbreviated form of the Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire. Despite these changes, the model performed as predicted. Finally, while significant, some of the effects presented in Figure 3 are modest in size, a factor that may have contributed to variations across smaller samples.
