Background characteristics refer to the year preceding the Wave 2 interview unless otherwise noted. Sociodemographic characteristics included age, race/ethnicity, marital status (married/cohabiting vs. not), educational attainment (attended/completed college vs. not), employment, and family income <$20,000 vs. ≥$20,000. Other measures included health insurance coverage (private, public, and none), usual source of medical care (private doctor, HMO doctor, clinic/emergency department, and none), number of medical conditions based on 17 conditions (e.g., diabetes, liver cirrhosis, hypertension) for which respondents had to report confirmation by a health professional, and number of major life stressors from a list of 14 (Dawson et al., 2005). Psychological and physical functioning comprised the norm-based mental and physical component scales (NBMCS and NBPCS) of the Short Form 12-Item Health Survey (SF-12v2) (Ware et al., 2002), rescaled to a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10 in the U.S. general population. Higher scores indicate better functioning. Age at first drink excluded tastes or sips of someone else’s drink. First-degree familial alcoholism comprised respondent-reported alcohol problems in biological parents, full siblings and/or biological children.
