NCJ Number
216959
Journal
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Volume: 46 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2007 Pages: 5-14
Date Published
January 2007
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article presents longitudinal findings over three waves of a study designed to assess the development of antisocial behaviors in young and early adolescent Puerto Rican children at two sites.
Abstract
Results of the study found that the trajectories of risk of disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) and of severity of antisocial behavior (ASB) were different for Puerto Rican children living in the South Bronx relative to those living in urban Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican children living in Puerto Rico were less at risk for DBD and ASB than those living in the South Bronx. In addition, the prevalence of conduct disorder (CD) was low, involving children at each site in any of the three waves. The findings suggest that clinicians working with children of Puerto Rican background need to be more conscious of the child’s context than of the child’s ethnicity when assessing these behaviors. Several longitudinal studies have traced the trajectory of ASB and DBDs over time. Previous epidemiologic studies among island Puerto Rican children report low rates of conduct disorder among children and adolescents residing in Puerto Rico. Through the use of standard assessment measures, representative samples of Puerto Rican children of both genders, age 5 to 13 years and their adult caretakers were interviewed at two sites: the South Bronx in New York City and the standard metropolitan areas in Puerto Rico. This article examined whether the trajectories of DBD within age and gender groups differed across the two sites over three waves of data collection. Tables and references