Page 54 - Age of onset of disruptive behavior of residentially treated adolescents -Sjoukje de Boer
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sexual abuse, mental health care received by at least one of the parents, parental conviction, or SES.
It is important to note that early-onset (and probably life course persistence) of disruptive behavior does occur in females. Females with EO disruptive behavior resembled their male counterparts to a great extend, they only differed on two characteristics. Compared with males of the EO group, more females with EO disruptive behavior had a parent who had been convicted of a crime. Sexual abuse was much more prevalent in females than in males, but this was found for both EO and AO groups, indicating that it was not related to the age onset of disruptive behavior. When tested for interaction effects, no significant sex differences were found. The number of girls in our sample, and the selection of characteristics were limited, but our findings do not support gender differences in these characteristics in their value for signaling EO disruptive behavior in adolescents. Gender differences may be present in biological or neurodevelopmental factors involved in the development of EO disruptive behavior (Eme, 2007, 2009; Kjelsberg, 1999).
It has to be noted that, methodologically, our set of variables did not permit an exhaustive test of all childhood variables that have been pinpointed to be involved in the development of LCP and AL antisocial behavior (e.g., peer characteristics, biological influences or neurodevelopmental factors). Also, the variables were not gathered at fixed moments during the early life of the patients as in epidemiological studies, but obtained retrospectively after admission. Some variables may have varied over time (e.g., child abuse, mental health of parents), but we presume that they have been considerably stable. Finally, comparison of our retrospective findings with epidemiological findings must be made with caution, because some retrospective measures (e.g., psychosocial variables) have low levels of agreement with prospective measures (Henry et al., 1994). In the present study, this was partly intercepted by using multi-informant information.
Many of the factors of epidemiological research that were found to be associated with EO disruptive behavior were also found to be associated with EO disruptive behavior in a highly selective clinical sample with severe disruptive behavior and co-occurring psychiatric disorders. This suggests that the factors associated with EO disruptive behavior probably also apply to other clinical (and non-clinical) samples
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