T5, T6, and T7 psychopathology

Both mother and youth reported on psychopathology and combined to create cross-reporter measures of adjustment at T5, T6, and T7. Multi-method measures of adjustment were sought to partially address the effects of shared method variance and reporter bias on the observed associations. Relying on only one method of assessment for a construct can lead to ambiguous interpretation of the validity of a measure (Marsh and Grayson, 1995), and combining reporters has been suggested to capture differing perspectives of adjustment (e.g., Hinshaw and Park, 1999). At T5, pre-adolescent psychopathology was assessed by youth report on the Youth Self-Report (YSR) and parent report on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach, 1991; Achenbach et al., 2003). At the T6 and T7 assessments adolescents and parents completed the 25-item Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 2001), selected to reduce participant burden, as it has substantially fewer items than the YSR and CBCL. The SDQ has good reliability and validity (Dickey and Blumberg, 2004; Goodman et al., 2010) and correlates strongly with the CBCL/YSR (Goodman and Scott, 1999).