Many attempts have been made to derive alcohol use typologies or subtypes of alcohol dependence and this study aimed at validating the type I/type II typology in a treatment sample of socially stable alcohol dependent males and females. A second aim was to compare the two types with respect to their temperament profiles. Data was part of a larger ongoing longitudinal study, the Gothenburg Alcohol Research Project, and included 269 alcohol dependent males and females recruited from three treatment centers. The results showed that type II alcoholism occurred as a more homogenous type than type I alcoholism, and type I alcoholism seemed too heterogeneous to be summarized into one single type. When adapting a strict classification, less than a third of the study population could be classified in accordance with the typology, suggesting that the typology is not applicable, at least in socially stable individuals with alcohol dependence. The results also showed that type II alcoholics showed higher levels of novelty seeking than did the individuals that were classified as type I alcoholics. Quite surprisingly, the individuals classified as type II alcoholics also showed higher levels of harm avoidance than did the individuals that were classified as type I alcoholics. 1. Background As a means of understanding the high level of heterogeneity among individuals with alcohol use disorders (AUD) in terms of etiology and manifestations, many attempts have been made to derive alcohol use typologies or alcoholic subtypes. Although a great deal of effort has been put into this area of research, no generally accepted typology has yet been presented. As the concept is employed here, a typology refers to a set of fairly homogenous classes with respect to some specified characteristics. Belonging to any of these classes does not have to be a fixed and unchangeable feature but might be seen as a more or less temporary state in the context of a dynamic process (see a discussion in [1]). We believe that a good typology includes three basic features: (1) some form of face validity or heuristic power, (2) the types occur more frequently than would be expected if the criteria were randomly distributed across the subjects (i.e., the types form natural clusters), and (3) a majority (read more than 50 percent) of the subjects could be classified according to the typology in question. In a study by Cloninger and colleagues [2] a population of 862 male adoptees was described in detail including data from temperance registers, child welfare agencies records, criminal records, and
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