Our results should be interpreted within the context of the following limitations. First, COGA is a high-risk sample with participants from extended families enriched for alcohol use disorders. Our findings may not generalize to samples with different risk profiles. Second, our measure of parental relationship discord was derived from retrospectively reports from the child’s perspective. Consequently, this measure may be subject to recall bias. It also may not objectively reflect the quality of parental marital relationships, as other studies report modest correlations between children’s and parents’ perceptions of parental relationship discord (Grych et al., 1992). Third, the timing of parental divorce and parental relationship discord while growing up were not assessed. Timing of these exposures may be important in view of evidence that younger children experience more problems after the divorce of their parents than do children who are older (Lansford, 2009). Fourth, although we treated parental divorce and parental discord as predictors of alcohol outcomes, it is important to note that timing of parental divorce and parental discord was not modeled in relation to offspring alcohol outcomes. Thus, our
