we
aimed
to
investigate
a
genetic
link
to addictive behaviors in general, rather than to specific addictive behaviors — in other
words, rather than testing several mediation models for each individual
addictive behavior. Also, many of the individual scales had unacceptably
high values for skewness and kurtosis, unlike the composite scale
whose frequency distribution more closely approximated a normal distribution. In addition, while the inter-correlations among the individual
scales were mostly of small magnitude (viz. between 0.00 and 0.30)
each subscale was more strongly associated with the total composite
score (r between 0.49 and 0.67). The alpha coefficient for this composite
scale was 0.93.