The results of the present study should be considered in view of the following limitations. First, this sample consisted of adolescents from Colorado, USA. This is not an epidemiological sample, and it is unclear to what extent the results can be generalized to adults or to other geographic areas. The symptoms and diagnoses used in the analyses were based on the self-reports of adolescents participating in a direct interview. Our adjudicated and clinical samples included mostly male subjects, while our community sample was mostly Caucasian. However, our item-level results were largely consistent with results from other studies of alcohol abuse and dependence symptoms 17, 19. It is important to note that treated cases were not excluded from the community sample, and therefore reflect their incidence in the underlying population. Due to power limitations, we were unable to test for differences related to sex, ethnicity or other variables. The DSM-IV alcohol symptoms were assessed based on self-reports and one operationalization of the DSM-IV symptoms. Our adjudicated sample included only 179 subjects; although this is a respectable size, the estimates for this
