least severe criterion among individuals aged 18 and older (Harford et al., 2009); in the current study it was the most severe criterion for men and second most severe for women, perhaps reflecting greater habituation to alcohol use in this high-risk sample. The strict operationalization of time spent as spending “so much time drinking or recovering from the effects of alcohol that you had little time for anything else” in the current study may also contribute to the discrepant findings. The qualifier “little time for anything else” may cause respondents to interpret the question as a more severe drinking-related behavior, resulting in lower endorsement and higher severity. For women, time spent was as severe a criterion as giving up activities to drink. In other studies in high risk (Wu et al., 2009; Gelhorn et al., 2008) and population-based samples (Saha et al., 2006) giving up activities is a more severe criterion than time spent.
