Such findings suggest that certain alcoholism symptoms reliably occur in a developmental sequence, which may reflect a potential key to understanding the nature of severity. One advantage of this method is that it considers both the nature and frequency of alcohol problems and thus has the potential to make the measurement of severity more reliable and perhaps more conceptually meaningful. Also, this approach provides the potential to separate those individuals later in an alcoholism progression from those who are simply having many problems, which may result in more homogeneous severity-based partitioning of individuals with alcohol problems.
