An overwhelming majority of studies that examine the link between personality and AUDs use self-report measures of personality. However, there are several drawbacks to self-report questionnaires (e.g., people may not view themselves realistically or understand how their behaviors affects other people; see Klonksy, Oltsmann, & Turkheimer, 2002). Further, correspondence between self- and informant-reports of personality is modest at best (e.g., Oltmanns, Turkheimer, & Strauss, 1998), suggesting informant reports provide additional information that cannot be obtained by self-report alone. Thus, future studies examining the AUD-personality link would benefit from the use of multi-informant data. Though gathering this additional information may be perceived as excessively time-consuming or expensive, several researchers have provided practical and effective suggestions on how to obtain such data (see Achenbach, Krukowski, Dumenci, & Ivanova, 2005; Vazire, 2006).
