Aside from the basic question of whether childhood internalizing symptoms are positively or negatively associated with adolescent alcohol use, the question remains whether the course of such symptoms is relevant to alcohol outcomes. Failure to account for symptom course could contribute to conflicting findings. That variation exists in the progression of internalizing symptoms has been well established (Fanti and Henrich, 2010; Feng et al., 2008; Marmorstein et al., 2010a; Reinke et al., 2012; Wanner et al., 2012), with some studies reporting courses related to severity (e.g, Fanti and Henrich, 2010), and others finding evidence of within-class change (e.g., high to low symptoms over time; Feng et al., 2008). Notably, the sample sizes in many of these studies are limited, and in some cases selected (rather than representative) samples were used. Still, few studies have derived trajectories of internalizing symptoms and explored their relationships with alcohol outcomes, and the samples’ age ranges differ across studies and from the age range in the current study. In a study of adolescents and young adults, Marmorstein (2009) examined trajectories of high vs. low depressive
