Developmental trajectory of conduct behaviour in preschool years: impact of time invariant and time varying predictors

This ongoing study examines the developmental trajectory of conduct problem and its associated risk antecedents in preschool children using Latent Growth Curve Models. Data for the study was drawn from the Growing Up in Scotland longitudinal survey. Within the survey, conduct behaviour was measured with Goodman’s (1997) Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Analyses proceeded by first examining invariance of the latent construct (conduct behaviour) over time. A methodological innovation in testing for invariance over time was to account for ordinality of the indicators. This approach has rarely been used and as far as we are aware has not been explored with the SDQ measure of conduct behaviour. In the second step of analyses, we explored the combined impact of multiple time invariant and time varying child, parental and
environmental predictors on trajectories of problem behaviour. The presentation will focus on the methodological steps for specifying and testing the different models as well implications of our findings.