Page 125 - Age of onset of disruptive behavior of residentially treated adolescents -Sjoukje de Boer

EO and AO distinction can be generalized to the (prospective) onset groups, since
studies also differ in the kind of information that is used to identify the disruptive behavior (e.g., self report, police records, criterion characteristic of conduct disorder).
As with all studies, in the present thesis (elaborated in chapter 2), the identified age of
onset depended on external factors and is therefore an approximation of the actual
age of onset of the disruptive behavior. It is likely that some adolescents have been identified as AO while their actual disruptive behavior started much earlier. It may for instance be that a teacher at school was able to handle behavioral problems to a
certain extent. In such a case, no special education may have been advised or just at a
later time, than it would have been with another teacher. Also, in case of adequate or
strict parental supervision, the age of onset of a first crime may have been postponed 7 as it were. Also, one parent may indicate more problems than the other, depending on
his or her own carrying load and subjective perspective. Such factors have not been taken into account in the present thesis. It should be noted that similar mechanisms would also have played a part in the population research.
There were also limitations with regard to the number and nature of factors that were associated with the EO and AO distinction. All individuals of the sample had encountered a vast amount of accumulating and interacting risk factors that, at most, were only partly covered by this study. Also, we only studied risk factors, neglecting the possible influence of protective factors (see e.g., De Vries Robbé, De Vogel, & Stam, 2012; Dubow, Huesmann, Boxer, & Smith, 2016; Lösel & Farrington, 2012; Monahan, Oesterle, Rhew, & Hawkins, 2014; Portnoy, Chen, & Raine, 2013) that are related to disruptive behavior. Risk factors as well as protective factors that were not included in the study (e.g., treatment factors, and patient characteristics, e.g., personality traits, psychotropic medication use, psychiatric disorders, family factors, pathology of parents) were probably also important in the relation between dropout, completion of treatment and general daily functioning after treatment. The explained variances of the factors found in the present thesis were relatively low, which suggests that many other factors played a role. This also indicates that the findings can only be used to a limited extent to predict behavior of the individual youths.
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