For both gender groups, symptom criteria for larger amounts, cut down, withdrawal, and legal problems have higher item thresholds but generally lower item discrimination and tend to exhibit greater dispersion at higher AUD severity (as measured by the latent factor representing the unidimensional trait of alcohol use disorder), particularly in the youngest age group (12–17). The high threshold and poor discrimination exhibited by some symptom criteria is consistent with the literature, which indicates that adolescents with high levels of alcohol problem severity do not always report attempts to set limits or cut down drinking, whereas some adolescents with low levels of alcohol problem severity do (Chung and Martin, 2002; Harford et al., 2005; Martin et al., 2006). The legal problem criterion has been shown to perform poorly in other IRT analyses (Langenbucher et al., 2004; Martin et al., 2006; Saha et al., 2006). The present findings related to this criterion may be a function of the large samples available for analysis.
