Female Alcoholism: New Perspectives‐Findings from the COGA Study

This symposium examined four different issues that ate frequently discussed in both the clinical and research literature with respect to female alcoholism, with some surprising findings. While dam related to the risk for developing alcoholism among women and data on female alcoholics iple becoming more common in the scientific literature, this growing area of research still suffers from the use of small samples, the failure to use reliable, well established clinical assessment methods, and samples that do not represent the population of females with varying levels of alcohol problems. Typically, these problems lead to erroneous conclusions and/or to findings that cannot be replicated. Large scale collaborative studies can overcome many of these problems by sampling both male and female subjects, by examining subjects with a range of severity of alcohol problems, by generating large systematically ascertained samples, and by using reliable, standardized assessment methods. Thus, the resulting data can overcome the potential problems often associated with previous studies of alcohol problems and alcoholism among females.