The goal of the present study was to explore the relationship between religious service attendance, retrospectively reported for childhood (C-RA; for ages 6–13 years) and currently, during adulthood (A-RA; current age 18–29 years) with three aspects of alcohol involvement (ever drinking, timing of first alcohol use and AUD) in 3,234 White and 553 Black female twins. First, we examined whether levels of C-RA and A-RA were associated with alcohol involvement measures across White and Black women. We hypothesized that (a) C-RA would be associated with ever drinking and timing of first alcohol use, but not AUD, and that A-RA would be associated with AUD and that (b) both associations would be stronger in White than Black women. Second, for those measures of alcohol involvement that were significantly correlated with C-RA and A-RA, univariate and bivariate twin models were fitted to raw data to decompose the variance in and covariance between alcohol involvement and C-RA as well as A-RA into genetic and environmental sources. We hypothesized that family environment would be a major contributor to this association in Whites.
