Participants also completed the Self-Rating of the Effects of Alcohol (SRE) form (Schuckit et al., 1997a) with a trained research interviewer. The SRE asks subjects to report the number of standard drinks required for each of four effects (beginning to feel intoxication, slurring speech, having an unsteady gait, and falling asleep when they did not want to) at several points in their lives. A standard drink was defined as 12 oz beer, 5 oz of wine, or one shot (1-1.5 oz) of 80-proof alcohol. The SRE has been shown to have one-year retest reliabilities as high as 0.8 and correlations with alcohol challenge results ranging from 0.4 to 0.6 (Schuckit et al., 1997a; 1997b). A higher score on the SRE indicates a lower level of response to alcohol. In this study we examined the SRE score for the first five lifetime drinking episodes (SRE_5) as a retrospective measure of initial sensitivity to alcohol.
