Page 66 - Age of onset of disruptive behavior of residentially treated adolescents -Sjoukje de Boer

At discharge the TOR-J (Boon et al., 2010) was administered to parents to verify their opinion of the treatment outcome compared to the youngsters’ assessments (i.e., SCL-90-R). This was done because the use of self-report instruments like the SCL-90-R within samples diagnosed with severe disruptive behavior may not yield reliable scores in juvenile delinquent samples (Breuk, Clauser, Stams, Slot, & Doreleijers, 2007), because they are subject to under-reporting and errors of memory (Moller, Tait, & Byrne, 2012). On the other hand, Crowley, Mikulich, Ehlers, Whitmore, and MacDonald (2001) found that although some patients minimized their symptoms, youths’ self- reports significantly discriminated patients from controls in DSM-IV conduct disorder and they concluded that patients’ self-reports (of conduct disorder) had good discriminative validity.
Overall, treatment outcome may vary across types of respondents (adolescent, parent, or therapist) or instruments. The proportion showing improvement, for instance, may differ across measures, and the measures may vary on which individuals improve (Rosenblatt & Rosenblatt, 2002). Moreover, the reliability of self-report inventories for measuring constructs such as psychopathology has been found to increase from childhood through adolescence (Frick, Barry, & Kamphaus, 2009; Kamphaus & Frick, 2002). Parent reports often disregard the adolescent’s own perspective. Covert acts and internalizing behavior, for example, are generally obscure to third-party informants.
Statistics
All analyses were performed using SPSS (version 18.0; 2009). Chi-square tests were used to examine differences between categorical variables and t-tests (two- tailed) were used to examine differences between responders and nonresponders regarding age, and length of treatment and between the EO group and the AO group on the SCL-90-R total score (GSI), and the TOR-J score “treatment results”. When TOR-J scores of both parents were available, the average of those scores was used. Improvement on the GSI of the EO and AO group was examined using mixed between- within subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA). Also, correlations (Pearson product- moment) were used to relate SCL-90-R treatment outcome to TOR-J “treatment results”.
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