et al., 2005; Iacono et al., 2008) are important predictors of at-risk drinking in their own right, but are also important given their possible relationships to other predictors of at-risk drinking, such as personality traits reflecting behavioral undercontrol/disinhibition (Iacono et al., 2008; von der Pahlen et al., 2008). In MIMIC models, we tested a direct effect of age at initiation of drinking and gender on the latent factor representing binge drinking and drinking more than intended. We hypothesized that evidence of differences between latent factors in age at initiation or gender in the presence of binge drinking could indicate a subgroup of at-risk drinkers whose class membership could be related to endorsement of other risk factors such as behavioral undercontrol/disinhibition and motives for drinking. With population heterogeneity established, we planned to proceed to conduct LCA to identify distinct classes of drinkers, followed by subsequent analyses to assess the extent to which these classes differed according to alcohol consumption variables and other risk factors.
