Attempts to improve the quality of substance abuse treatment are hampered by an inability to define specifically the elements of high quality of care and, more important, the lack of a research paradigm within which to study the necessary and sufficient elements of appropriate care. This study proposes that the quality-of-care (QOC) construct for substance abuse treatment might be best considered as a latent construct that does not necessarily exist as a single set of criteria but instead is indicated by a set of empirically derived indicators manifested as a latent factor. Results support defining latent QOC variables across levels of care for alcoholism treatment and empirically defining latent QOC measures from administrative records.