Comorbidity of internalizing and externalizing problems and its risk and protective factors have not been well incorporated into developmental research, especially among racial minority youth from high-poverty neighborhoods. The present study identified a latent comorbid factor as well as specific factors underlying internalizing and externalizing problems among 592 African American adolescents living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods (291 male; M age = 15.9 years, SD = 1.43 years). Stressful life events and racial discrimination were associated with higher comorbid problems, whereas stressful life events and exposure to violence were associated with higher specific externalizing problems. Collective efficacy was associated with both lower specific externalizing problems and lower comorbid problems. Moreover, high collective efficacy buffered the risk effects of stressful life events and racial discrimination on comorbid problems. Our results demonstrated the advantages of latent variable modeling to understanding comorbidity by articulating impacts of risk factors on comorbid and specific components underlying internalizing and externalizing problems. They also highlighted the protective effect of collective efficacy in mitigating risks for these problems. These findings broadly call for more studies on comorbidities in developmental psychopathology among youth from diverse sociocultural backgrounds.High comorbidity rates of internalizing and externalizing problems have been extensively documented among youth and adults (Angold, Costello, & Erkanli, 1999; Cerdá, Sagdeo, & Galea, 2008). Epidemiological evidence supports the notion that comorbidity, a condition where two unrelated types of problems co-occur with a rate that far exceeds chance (Caron & Rutter, 1991), is not a mere artifact of sampling or clinical referral bias (e.g., Angold et al., 1999;Cerda´ et al., 2008;Kessler et al., 1994Kessler et al., , 2005. The prevalence of comorbidity across internalizing and externalizing problems highlights the need to reconceptualize psychopathology and its development (Eaton, Rodriguez-Seijas, Carragher, & Krueger, Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Darlene A. Kertes, Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-2250; dkertes@ufl.edu.
HHS Public AccessAuthor manuscript Dev Psychopathol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 January 11. Eaton, South, & Krueger, 2010;Krueger & Markon, 2006). Traditional nosology has been challenged on the grounds that seemingly discrete symptoms may represent at least in part a common underlying pathology for internalizing and externalizing problems (Caron & Rutter, 1991). Moreover, risk and protective factors need to be investigated in light of comorbidity, because examining one type of problem in the absence of the other is likely to produce biased or incomplete results (Caron & Rutter, 1991; Liu, Bolland, Dick, Mustanski, & Kertes, 2016). Comorbidity may also indicate shared etiological factors, as well as direct recipr...