Maximum drinks consumed in a 24-hour period (maxdrinks) were assessed with the question, “In your lifetime, what is the largest number of drinks you have ever had in a 24-hour period (including all types of alcohol)?” Values over 50 were recoded to 50 (based on the assumption that the number was an overestimate). The distribution of maxdrinks showed peaks at multiples of 5 and 6, suggesting that participants were estimating either by rounding to the nearest multiple of 5 or by counting 6 packs of beer (i.e., not a true continuous distribution), so we chose to treat maxdrinks as an ordinal variable. The distribution was split into quintiles: 1–6, 7–14, 15–23, 24–30, and >30 drinks to create a 5-level categorical variable.
