We chose to focus on dating several people as the romantic relationship status of interest in this model in view of earlier findings in this same sample that dating several people was distinctively associated with higher alcohol use and problems compared to being single or being in an exclusive relationship (Salvatore et al., 2014). 2 Accordingly, relationship status was dummy coded “Dating Several People” as 0 (Not dating several people: single, exclusive, engaged, married) or 1 (Dating several people). For our alcohol use outcome, we used a residualized change score (i.e., the saved residuals from a regression of follow-up alcohol use on baseline alcohol use). By using a residualized change score as our alcohol outcome, we reduce the potential confound that observed associations (e.g., between reports of parental alcohol problems and follow-up alcohol use) are purely attributable to the stability in alcohol use across the baseline and follow-up assessments, r(3736) = 0.69, p < 0.01. Covariates included sex and two dummy-coded race variables. Owing to the fact that our binary relationship status variable was a mediator in our model, we
