Conduct problems from age 2 to age 10: Family and cognitive predictors

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of children diagnosed with conduct disorder; this is worrying because conduct disorder (especially if it begins early in life) is associated with many further problems including school-failure, delinquency, depression, substance-abuse and criminality. As a result, by the age of 28, children with early-onset conduct disorder cost public services 10 times as much as their typically-developing peers. Family factors play a prominent role in the onset and maintenance of conduct disorder: for example, 74% of juvenile offenders report family breakdown, and children with depressed mothers or low-income families are 2- to 5- times as likely as their peers to develop conduct disorder.

The proposed study involves a socially diverse sample of 194 10-year-old children who previously took part in detailed cognitive and observational assessments at ages 4 and 6; for 122 of these children, detailed data (including mother-child observations) are also available at age 2 and 3. This age 10 follow up includes experimental and observational assessments that parallel those used at earlier time-points. In addition, during school visits, whole class sessions will be used to gather classmates' nominations that will provide a robust index of the study children's peer status (e.g., popular / rejected etc) and peer reputation (e.g., for leadership, aggression, sociability and isolation). Finally, the proposed home visits will include a 'life history calendar' interview with mothers, focusing on the duration and co-occurrence of life events (such as family change or maternal depression). Data from the four time-points will be examined in relation to conduct disorder scores using path analysis.

Immediate beneficiaries from this research will include policy makers, educationalists, child mental health professionals and charities aimed at supporting children and their families. In the longer term (i.e., 5 to 10 years), beneficiaries from this research will include children at risk of developing conduct problems, their families, schools and communities. As noted in the introduction, this proposal can be seen as a response to the government-commissioned Allen report, such that the findings should be of interest to all policy makers involved in developing initiatives to promote the effectiveness of early interventions. Conduct problems are a major challenge for schools, as they disrupt learning both for the children themselves and for their classmates; in extremis, conduct problems can make it difficult for schools to create a safe environment for children. Increasingly, it is recognized that schools cannot eradicate conduct problems that originate in family difficulties. Thus the findings from this research should also be helpful for educationalists (e.g., being able to distinguish between the adverse family experiences of bullies vs. bully-victims should help in the development of more effective interventions). As noted in the Allen report, without effective intervention, conduct problems present a major cost to society (e.g., in terms of special educational services for children who have been excluded from school, mental health services and costs within the criminal justice system). Refining our understanding of the factors that lead to conduct problems should improve the effectiveness of interventions and so save the public purse. Finally, the researchers working on this project will also gain valuable skills in constructing systematic and comprehensive visual records of life-events and in analysing the development of conduct problems from a temporally dynamic perspective. Such skills are likely to be valuable across several employment sectors: for example, one of the applicant's recent PhD students who became proficient in statistical modelling is now working very successfully in the financial sector.