Data on parental ADS were drawn from parents’ SSAGA interviews. 425 (33.2%) fathers and 662 (51.6%) mothers completed SSAGA in the first wave of COGA; 648 (50.5%) fathers and 1011 (78.9%) mothers completed SSAGA in the 5-year follow up wave. Only a small subset of parents (93 fathers and 111 mothers) completed SSAGA when their adolescents enrolled in the COGA Prospective Sample, as many of them already completed SSAGA earlier and thus were not invited for the interview again. Some parents refused to participate and others were lost to contact (e.g., because of parental separation and/or not living with the offspring). For parents (373 fathers and 626 mothers) who completed SSAGA twice, we used data from the interview in which they endorsed the greatest number of ADS to index their ADS. Parental ADS was operationalized as the number of alcohol dependence criteria endorsed according to the DSM-IV criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Our rationale for using ADS data from a single interview (vs. calculating average scores across multiple assessments when available) was that in high-risk sample such as COGA we wanted to measure parents’ greatest expression of their predisposition/risk to alcohol dependence on which the sample was originally ascertained.
