The methodology used in this study differs from conventional risk factor analysis in which a dichotomous diagnostic variable is regressed on a set of covariates or hypothesized antecedents. Instead, a continuous latent variable (AUD) defined by a set of symptom criteria is regressed on the covariates. Despite these methodological differences, the associations between the demographic variables and AUD found in this study are consistent with those from other general population studies (Caetano and Clark, 1998; Dawson, 1998; Grant et al., 2004) and analyses of more recent national surveys using structural equation modeling (Grant et al., 2007; Harford and Muthén, 2001).
