Although the findings from the current study fill an important gap in the literature, there are several limitations that should be noted. First, the response rate to our open letter of recruitment was slightly above 25%. This raises the possibility that respondents to our recruitment may not have been representative of families with 12-month old infants. Our comparison of respondents with the entire population of birth records suggested that the differences were small with respect to the variables that we could examine. However there could have been significant differences in variables that we could not assess. Thus, although generating our sample from birth records has important advantages over newspaper or clinic-based samples, generalizability of results may be limited to the population of higher functioning families, who may be more likely to respond to open letters of recruitment about participation in research. A second potential limitation was that we chose to focus exclusively on marital satisfaction as our intervening or mediating variable. However, other variables particularly for fathers may also act as additional mechanisms through which paternal alcoholism exerts its effects
