A general psychopathology factor in early adolescence

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Abstract

Background

Recently, a general psychopathology dimension reflecting common aspects among disorders has been identified in adults. This has not yet been considered in children and adolescents, where the focus has been on externalising and internalising dimensions.

Aims

To examine the existence, correlates and predictive value of a general psychopathology dimension in young people.

Method

Alternative factor models were estimated using self-reports of symptoms in a large community-based sample aged 11–13.5 years ( N= 23 477), and resulting dimensions were assessed in terms of associations with external correlates and future functioning.

Results

Both a traditional two-factor model and a bi-factor model with a general psychopathology bi-factor fitted the data well. The general psychopathology bi-factor best predicted future psychopathology and academic attainment. Associations with correlates and factor loadings are discussed.

Conclusions

A general psychopathology factor, which is equal across genders, can be identified in young people. Its associations with correlates and future functioning indicate that investigating this factor can increase our understanding of the aetiology, risk and correlates of psychopathology.

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Most cited references 10

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Identification of risk loci with shared effects on five major psychiatric disorders: a genome-wide analysis

Steven Hamilton, Peter Holmans, paul lichtenstein … (2013)

The Lancet, 381(9875), 1371-1379

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When to use broader internalising and externalising subscales instead of the hypothesised five subscales on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ): data from British parents, teachers and children.

George Ploubidis, Anna Goodman, Donna Lamping (2010)

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a widely used child mental health questionnaire with five hypothesised subscales. There is theoretical and preliminary empirical support for combining the SDQ's hypothesised emotional and peer subscales into an 'internalizing' subscale and the hypothesised behavioral and hyperactivity subscales into an 'externalizing' subscale (alongside the fifth prosocial subscale). We examine this using parent, teacher and youth SDQ data from a representative sample of 5-16 year olds in Britain (N = 18,222). Factor analyses generally supported second-order internalizing and externalizing factors, and the internalizing and externalizing subscales showed good convergent and discriminant validity across informants and with respect to clinical disorder. By contrast, discriminant validity was poorer between the emotional and peer subscales and between the behavioral, hyperactivity and prosocial subscales. This applied particularly to children with low scores on those subscales. We conclude that there are advantages to using the broader internalizing and externalizing SDQ subscales for analyses in low-risk samples, while retaining all five subscales when screening for disorder.

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The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: a pilot study on the validity of the self-report version.

R. Goodman, H. Meltzer, V. Bailey (1998)

The self-report version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was administered to two samples of 11-16 year olds: 83 young people in the community and 116 young people attending a mental health clinic. The questionnaire discriminated satisfactorily between the two samples. For example, the clinic mean for the total difficulties score was 1.4 standard deviations above the community mean, with clinic cases being over six times more likely to have a score in the abnormal range. The correlations between self-report SDQ scores and teacher- or parent-rated SDQ scores compared favourably with the average cross-informant correlations in previous studies of a range of measures. The self-report SDQ appears promising and warrants further evaluation.