To examine these potential explanations further, the prevalence of hazardous use was decomposed into the actual items that made up the criterion for both NLAES and NESARC (see Table 4). There are several points to highlight in Table 4. First, as previously noted in the methods section, the items are similar yet not identical between the two datasets (see Table 1) and had different scoring methods. Second, Chou et al. (2005) used the seemingly comparable items between the two datasets (i.e., “More than once drive a car, motorcycle, truck, boat, or other vehicle after having too much to drink”; see Chou et al., 2005) to conclude that past-12 month rates of drinking and driving decreased from 1992 to 2002 (3.7% in NLAES, 2.9% in NESARC). There is also a similar decrease between these items when taking into account dependence (1.95% in NLAES, 1.64% in NESARC). However, lifetime rates of these items appear to increase between NLAES and NESARC (3.92% in NLAES, 10.11% in NESARC). Third, the NESARC hazardous use criterion includes an additional item that is ostensibly related to drinking
