African Americans vary in their risk for problem drinking as a function of genetic vulnerability, demographic factors, environmental factors, and learning history. Some of these risk factors (e.g., sex, family history, peer use, expectancies) have similar associations with drinking for African Americans as for European Americans. There are other risk factors that are likely to be more important for the African American community (i.e., ethnic identity, Africentrism, and exposure to discrimination) than to the European American community. Our discussion of individual differences will also include factors we have already described as important for understanding overall group differences between African Americans and European Americans; we consider them briefly again in this section because they also contribute to individual differences among African Americans (studies reviewed in this section are detailed in Table 5). We present these findings with the important caveat that, to date, there have been too few studies of individual differences within African Americans, as researchers have tended to focus on differences between races. Of the studies reviewed in this section, a majority were conducted among community-based convenience samples. Further empirical studies need to be conducted to determine the generalizability of the findings among all African Americans.
