Testing Syndromes of Psychopathology in Parent and Youth Ratings Across Societies

Masha Y. Ivanova, Thomas M. Achenbach, Leslie A. Rescorla, Jiesi Guo, Robert R. Althoff, Kees Jan Kan, Fredrik Almqvist, Ivan Begovac, Anders G. Broberg, Myriam Chahed, Marina Monzani da Rocha, Anca Dobrean, Manfred Döepfner, Nese Erol, Eric Fombonne, Antonio Castro Fonseca, Maria Forns, Alessandra Frigerio, Hans Grietens, Nohelia Hewitt-RamirezFernando Juarez, Ilona Kajokienė, Yasuko Kanbayashi, Young Ah Kim, Bo Larsson, Patrick Leung, Xianchen Liu, Alfio Maggiolini, Asghar Minaei, Paulo A.S. Moreira, Kyung Ja Oh, Djaouida Petot, Cecilia Pisa, Rolando Pomalima, Alexandra Roussos, Vlasta Rudan, Michael Sawyer, Mimoza Shahini, Edwiges Ferreira de Mattos Silvares, Zeynep Simsek, Hans Christoph Steinhausen, Lajos Szirovicza, Jose Valverde, Laura Viola, Sheila Weintraub, Christa Winkler Metzke, Tomasz Wolanczyk, Bernardine Woo, Eugene Yuqing Zhang, Nelly Zilber, Rita Žukauskienė, Frank C. Verhulst

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

As societies become increasingly diverse, mental health professionals need instruments for assessing emotional, behavioral, and social problems in terms of constructs that are supported within and across societies. Building on decades of research findings, multisample alignment confirmatory factor analyses tested an empirically based 8-syndrome model on parent ratings across 30 societies and youth self-ratings across 19 societies. The Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 6–18 and Youth Self-Report for Ages 11–18 were used to measure syndromes descriptively designated as Anxious/Depressed, Withdrawn/Depressed, Somatic Complaints, Social Problems, Thought Problems, Attention Problems, Rule-Breaking Behavior, and Aggressive Behavior. For both parent ratings (N = 61,703) and self-ratings (N = 29,486), results supported aggregation of problem items into 8 first-order syndromes for all societies (configural invariance), plus the invariance of item loadings (metric invariance) across the majority of societies. Supported across many societies in both parent and self-ratings, the 8 syndromes offer a parsimonious phenotypic taxonomy with clearly operationalized assessment criteria. Mental health professionals in many societies can use the 8 syndromes to assess children and youths for clinical, training, and scientific purposes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)596-609
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology
Volume48
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 4 2019

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Clinical Psychology

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