Content, diagnostic, correlational, and genetic similarities between common measures of childhood aggressive behaviors and related psychiatric traits

Abstract

Background: Given the role of childhood aggressive behavior (AGG) in everyday child development, precise and accurate measurement is critical in clinical practice and research. This study aims to quantify agreement among widely used measures of childhood AGG regarding item content, clinical concordance, correlation, and underlying genetic construct. Methods: We analyzed data from 1254 Dutch twin pairs (age 8-10 years, 51.1% boys) from a general population sample for whom both parents completed the A-TAC, CBCL, and SDQ at the same occasion. Results: There was substantial variation in item content among AGG measures, ranging from .00 (i.e., mutually exclusive) to .50 (moderate agreement). Clinical concordance (i.e., do the same children score above a clinical threshold among AGG measures) was very weak to moderate with estimates ranging between .01 and .43 for motherreports and between .12 and .42 for father-reports. Correlations among scales were weak to strong, ranging from .32 to .70 for mother-reports and from .32 to .64 for father-reports. We found weak to very strong genetic correlations among the measures, with estimates between .65 and .84 for mother-reports and between .30 and .87 for fatherreports. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that degree of agreement between measures of AGG depends on the type (i.e., item content, clinical concordance, correlation, genetic correlation) of agreement considered. Because agreement was higher for correlations compared to clinical concordance (i.e., above or below a clinical cutoff), we propose the use of continuous scores to assess AGG, especially for combining data with different measures. Although item content can be different and agreement among observed measures may not be high, the genetic correlations indicate that the underlying genetic liability for childhood AGG is consistent across measures.

Systematic Review: Molecular Studies of Common Genetic Variation in Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Disorders

“…have been reported for measures of aggression depending on rater and item content of available measures. 123,124 Rather than combining different measurements to achieve large sample sizes, more stringent phenotyping to obtain more homogeneous phenotypes may contribute to the identification of associated variants and SNP-based heritability. 122,123 Results from GWASs can also be informative in understanding the underlying genetic architecture and biological mechanisms of childhood psychiatric traits, and the identification of genome-wide significant hits is an important first step, as observed by the implication of dopamine regulation in ADHD.…”

Developmental co-occurrence of psychopathology dimensions in childhood

“…First, the use of different scales in TEDS and NTR might have influenced our results. For example, although as noted earlier SDQ and CBCL scales have been found to be highly comparable across cohorts (Goodman and Scott, 1999, Bartels et al, 2018, Porsch et al, 2016, Hendriks et al, 2020, differences between constructs might still account for some of the cohort specific effects we observed in our study. This might be indexed for example by differences in estimated twin heritability of the constructs (Information S2).…”

Developmental co‐occurrence of psychopathology dimensions in childhood

“…First, the use of different scales in TEDS and NTR might have influenced our results. For example, although as noted earlier SDQ and CBCL scales have been found to be highly comparable across cohorts (Goodman and Scott, 1999, Bartels et al, 2018, Porsch et al, 2016, Hendriks et al, 2020, differences between constructs might still account for some of the cohort specific effects we observed in our study. On top of these, other between cohort differences could be at play, such as cultural and societal differences.…”