Aggressive Conduct Disorder: The Influence of Social Class, Sex and Age on the Clinical Picture

Abstract

Past studies have shown that aggressive conduct disorder is more common in boys and in families of low socioeconomic status, and that affected children are usually seen in child psychiatry clinics before the age of 10. In this work we aimed to find how socioeconomic status, sex and age at admission influence the clinical picture of this disorder. We divided a series of 58 affected children into two groups on each of the three factors and compared the groups on 175 variables. We found little evidence that the children's difficulties varied with social class, sex or age. This apparent constancy of the clinical picture reinforces the idea that aggressive conduct disorder is a valid, though broadly defined, psychiatric syndrome.

Subgrouping Conduct Disorder by Psychiatric Family History

“…PACD boys have an earlier age of onset and are younger when first referred to medical attention. This finding, which may be simply an indication of the severity of the child's symptoms, has been reported previously (Behar & Stewart, 1984) in a similar group of children. Behar and Stewart (1984) also found that aggressive conduct disordered boys have a higher prevalence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.…”

Do the Predictors of Child Conduct Problems Vary by High- and Low-Levels of Socioeconomic and Neighborhood Risk?

“…In regard to vulnerability factor/ provoking agent theory, it is not clear what this theory would predict. Although the theory asserts that vulnerability factors only affect CP when combined with provoking agents, the theory does not (1) For African American girls, father absence was more closely related to theft if the absent father had been unemployed for more than 1 month, and (2) For Caucasian girls, father absence was more closely related to assault, vandalism, and auto-trespass for girls whose father had never been unemployed and was not a manual laborer Behar and Stewart (1984) 58 in-patients aged 3-14 with conduct disorder (2) When analyses were limited to urban youth, low supervision and was more closely related to delinquency in communities characterized by high rates of male joblessness Findings: Parent support was more closely related to school misconduct for youth victimized in the community versus those who had only witnessed violence in the community, and nonexposed youth Pettit, Bates, and Dodge (1997a) make assertions about the impact of provoking agents independent of vulnerability factors. Interactions were detected in 39 of the 44 family studies for at least one measure of familial and SN risk.…”

“…Given established relations between ADHD and environmental risk, and CP and SN risk (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000;McLoyd, 1990;Pineda et al, 1999), range restriction could have reduced the magnitude of association between ADHD and CP in settings with low-SN risk in the The only other individual risk factors that were studied more than once were callousness and attitudes about deviant behavior. Callousness, labeled as lack of guilt in one study (Behar & Stewart, 1984) and as egocentricity in another (Beyers et al, 2001), was found to be more closely related to CP in environments lacking in SN risk in both studies. Deviant attitudes, on the other hand, were found to be equally associated with CP across contexts (Beyers et al, 2001;Hoffman, 2003).…”

Factors Which Predict the Persistence of Aggressive Conduct Disorder

“…The lack of agreement on how to classify conduct disorders into specific types has hindered research on their outcome. However, there is growing evidence that aggressive conduct disorder is a valid, if broad, psychiatric syndrome (Behar & Stewart, 1984). This evidence includes a body of work on the fate of aggressive boys in general and two follow-up studies of the specific disorder.…”