Relationship between two ways of measuring alcohol dependence

One of the main difficulties hampering research with the concept of the alcohol dependence syndrome is the lack of a set of agreed-upon operational definitions of each element composing the syndrome. To illustrate the possible impact of these different operationalizations of alcohol dependence on research results, this article shows the correlation between two different sets of items used to operationalize DSM-III-R alcohol dependence in a clinical sample. Results show that the correlations between the various sets of items are low. About 60% of the correlations are in between .21 and .40. These results suggest that different operationalizations of dependence may not be measuring the same phenomena, and should not be seen as interchangeable.