Although most items used in this study were adopted from previously established systems, such as DSM-IV and ESYTC, items used in our study may not perfectly map onto any of these systems due to item exclusions and availabilities at different measurement occasions. In addition, the results of our study should be interpreted in terms of the relationships between the latent factors measured by alcohol use and antisocial behavior items, not the relationships between the diagnoses of alcohol dependence and conduct disorder. We used available items as indicators of continuous latent variables in our cross-lagged models. Thus, the diagnostic criteria for DSM-IV alcohol dependence do not apply to the sets of items used in our study. ESYTC, from which most antisocial behavior items were adopted, was not developed for diagnostic purposes.
