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Children of Alcoholics have been considered at risk for centuries. Studies examining the children of alcoholics have been criticised on methodological grounds. This paper intends to give a brief overview of the major methodological issues concerned with instruments to identify children of alcoholics, generalisability of samples, research design and analysis of data. The first chapter begins with a brief overview of the previous research on children of alcoholics and the second chapter discusses the methods used to identify children of alcoholics. The third chapter discusses some of the major issues in sampling methods which include the over-reliance on clinical samples rather than community samples, lack of control groups, and other third variable influences. The fourth chapter discusses the research designs that are mainly used in children of alcoholic's research. The last chapter delivers some possible recommendations to overcome the issues.
