The study found that after controlling for other factors, the relationship between depression and alcohol abuse/dependence was no longer significant for girls, but it remained significant for boys. Among girls, however, cigarette smoking was significantly related to depression. The association between alcohol abuse/dependence and depression in girls diminished when child age was added to the equation. Even for boys, the results showed that the relationship between alcohol abuse/dependence and depression would have been overestimated if the other risk factors, anxiety and disruptive disorder in particular, were not controlled. Implications of these findings are drawn for gender-related strategies in dealing with alcohol-related and tobacco-related problems. Data for this study were drawn from two epidemiological U.S. studies. One study, Methods for the Epidemiology of Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders (MECA) was a multisite collaborative survey that consisted of 1,285 children and adolescents (ages 9-17), randomly selected from 4 geographic areas. The second study, the Westchester Study (WS), was a survey of mental health needs and service use among youth (ages 9-17), including 173 youth recruited randomly from the community. Since the same study instrument was used in both studies, and the New York subsample of the MECA study and the WS community sample were selected from the same sampling frame, it was appropriate to combine these 2 samples (MECA, n=1,285; WS, n=173; and total, n=1,458). The survey instrument contained measures of alcohol and other drug-use disorders, depression and other mental disorders, and sociodemographic and parental characteristics. 3 tables and 76 references