A question on the modified SAM asks, “What is the largest amount of alcohol you ever consumed in a 24-hour period?” This information was missing for nine mothers. In addition, we did not include mothers who never drank, leading to the exclusion of three to eight families in each of the different age-sex cohorts. The final sample is characterized in Table 1. The distribution of responses on this measure appears in Figure 1, plotted separately for mothers with and without a diagnosis of alcohol dependence. We used a log transformation to compensate for the positive skew in the distribution and standardized the measure for a more straightforward interpretation of the results from regression analyses.
