Attempts to validate IRT-based severity parameters for the 11 DSM-IV AUD showed that individuals who endorsed increasingly severe criteria had increasingly large numbers of total criteria endorsed and increasingly high values for a wide variety of AUD correlates (lower values in the case of psychological functioning, where an inverse relationship would be expected). The one exception to this rule was the criterion of recurrent legal problems caused by drinking, which had the highest severity ranking but which was associated with middling levels for total criteria endorsed and the eight outcome/validating measures. This apparent lack of validity with respect to the legal problems criterion is consistent with past research in which deletion of this criterion improved model fit and resulted in more robust IRT parameters, leading to the suggestion that legal problems be dropped as a criterion in future revisions of the DSM (Saha et al., 2006). It may reflect the fact that positive endorsement requires factors that are exogenous to the individual, e.g., apprehension and/or arrest, and whose likelihood may vary according to factors other than AUD severity. Legal problems
