Second, the assessment of interactions can be sensitive to the distributional properties of the dependent variable, here alcohol consumption. The major problem is heteroscadasticity, which can produce overly influential data points, typically as the high end of a rightward skewed distribution. We explored optimal transformations of our data to minimize heteroscadasticity, and the logarithmic transformation, a standard approach in the analysis of alcohol intake (Viken et al. 2007), performed best.
