Because of the as yet limited work in this area, as well as varied study designs and study questions, it remains unclear what role gender may play in the association between parental alcoholism and a broad range of psychopathology in the adult children of alcoholics. To investigate, we analyzed data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) to examine the relevance of parental history of alcoholism and parent and offspring gender in the expression of a wide range of psychiatric illnesses. We hypothesized that parental history of alcoholism would increase the odds for psychiatric illness regardless of gender; that there would be significant differences between men and women in the prevalence of psychiatric illnesses; and that the prevalence of these disorders would reflect significant interactions between parental history of alcoholism and gender. Due to the lack of available literature and inconsistency in previous studies, we did not have a priori hypotheses about the nature or direction of these interactions.
