NCJ Number
168513
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 26 Issue: 3 Dated: June 1997 Pages: 321-338
Date Published
1997
Length
18 pages
Annotation
Using a sample of 11,516 secondary school students in the Netherlands, this study examined the extent to which various behavioral, emotional, and cognitive problems reflected one or more underlying common factors, "actually" co-occurred, and were "single" problems.
Abstract
The sample subjects ranged in age from 12 to 18 years and were representative of the entire Dutch population of that age group. The questionnaire administered to the sample covered a number of areas, including physical and mental health, lifestyle, behavioral patterns, at-risk behaviors, attitudes toward various topics, income, consumption patterns, and leisure activities. This study dealt only with the data on addiction-risk, aggressive/criminal, emotional, and cognitive problems. The study identified addiction-risk behaviors, aggressive/criminal behaviors, mood problems, and cognitive problems. The internal structure of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive problems was studied by means of principal component analyses. Three principal component analyses with varimax rotation were conducted to summarize the most important correlations between the variables. The findings suggest the existence of adolescent "subgroups" with divergent comorbidity patterns: those who primarily report one "single" symptom, those who report concurrent symptoms either exclusively in the category of behavioral problems or exclusively in the category of emotional and cognitive problems, and those who report concurrent symptoms in both categories. This distinction among different subgroups has important theoretical, diagnostic, and treatment implications. 4 tables and 38 references