Regarding Hypothesis 4, our group was concerned that the relationships of SRE scores to maximum drinks and alcohol problems might diminish in a second generation. This could have reflected cohort-related changes in attitudes about drinking and related problems and occurred because the SRE values related to either parent would be diluted by characteristics of the second parent. The results, however, revealed unexpected higher offspring SRE-5 and SRE-T correlations with maximum drinks and alcohol problems compared to the parent generation. That observation is reassuring regarding the potential clinical usefulness of the SRE scores as correlates of problematic drinking in new generations of drinkers.
