2. Does being the child of an alcoholic influence adolescent drinking behavior? Curran, Stice, and Chassin examined the growth in adolescents’ alcohol, along with that of their peers, over a three-year period (Curran, Stice, & Chassin, 1997). Here we will use a portion of the data to examine the effect of parents’ alcoholism and adolescents’ rebelliousness on the developmental trajectory of adolescents’ drinking behavior. The data

(matrix) are in the file are in the file “curran et al alcohol.xls,” with the matrix derived from reports of 363 adolescents age 10 to 15 and their parents. Variables include self reports of students’ drinking behavior yearly for three years (Adol1 through Adol3), composite scores derived from items addressing frequency of use, frequency of excessive drinking, and frequency of getting drunk. Possible explanatory variables include parent alcoholism (Parent, 1 for yes, 0 for no), Age at time 1 (in years), and self-reported rebelliousness (Rebel1), a composite in which adolescents rated agreement with eight items concerning rule breaking a getting away with things. The file includes a Sex variable (0=girl, 1=boy), but it is not used for this exercise. See if you can set up these analyses from this description. For more information about these variables and the study

(and for an illustration of a LGM with more than one set of developmental trajectories)

see the original article (Curran et al., 1997).