To assess alcohol-related problems, we follow a sociological tradition in which problems are disaggregated into broad categories and studied separately as the negative social consequences of drinking, and alcohol dependence symptoms (Midanik and Clark, 1995). Our index of social consequences has been used in previous NAS surveys and consists of 15 items tapping five types of negative consequences that the respondent attributed to his or her own drinking: arguments or fights, such as with a spouse or people with whom the respondent lives, accidents, and workplace, legal, and health problems as a result of drinking (Midanik and Greenfield, 2000). Our index of dependence symptoms includes 13 items assessing loss of control, blackouts, hands shaking, and other physiological symptoms of excessive alcohol use (ibid.). In our main analyses, we examined one or more social consequences and two or more dependence symptoms as two distinct outcomes. Use of these relatively low thresholds provided greater statistical power in our multivariate models of racial disparities in alcohol problems. In our bivariate analyses, however, we utilized a third, more stringent measure to capture DSM-IV alcohol
