Abstract
Physical aggression declines for the majority of children from preschool to elementary school. Although this desistance generally continues during adolescence and early adulthood, a small group of children maintain a high level of physical aggression over time and develop other serious overt and covert antisocial behaviors. Typically, researchers have examined relations of developmental changes in physical aggression to later violence with teachers’ or mothers’ reports on surveys. Little is known about the degree to which children’s self-reported physical aggression predicts later antisocial behavior. The longitudinal study in this article had a staggered, multiple cohort design. Measures of physical aggression were collected through self- and mother reports from age 11–14 years, which were used to construct trajectory groups (attrition was 6 and 14% from age 11–14, respectively, for self- and mother reports). Overt and covert antisocial behaviors were self-reported at age 18–19 years (attrition was 36% from age 11 to 18–19). Four trajectory groups (low stable, 11%; moderate-low declining, 34%; moderate declining, 39%; high stable, 16%) were identified from self-reports, whereas three trajectories (low declining, 33%; moderate declining, 49%; high stable, 18%) were identified from mothers’ ratings. We examined the prediction of overt and covert antisocial behaviors in early adulthood from the high stable and the moderate declining trajectories. According to both informants, higher probability of belonging to the high stable group was associated with higher overt and covert antisocial behavior, whereas higher probability of belonging to the moderate declining group was associated with higher covert antisocial behavior. Our results support the value of children’s as well as mothers’ reports of children’s aggression for predicting different types of serious antisocial behavior in adulthood.
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Notes
Previous psychometric studies on the PVA scale have not explored its multidimensionality but sustained its monolithic dimensionality based on exploratory factor analyses [9, 30]. In order to update these results, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the factor structure of the PVA scale for self- and mother reports, accounting for the order categorical nature of its items. A two-factor model provided a better fit to the PVA scale for both self- and mother reports: one factor for physical aggression and another one for verbal aggression. Details on these analyses are available from the first author upon request. Only PA was used in this study.
In each model, the initial level of the outcome referred to the unique contribution of the outcome at age 14 years that was not shared with PA at age 14 years. Thus, we obtained residual variables by regressing PA at age 14 years based on self-report onto OAB and CAB at age 14 years (explained variances were, respectively, 38 and 15%).
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Acknowledgments
This study was partially supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and W. T. Grant Foundation to Albert Bandura, from the Ministero dell’Istruzione dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) to Gian Vittorio Caprara (COFIN 1998, 2000) and to Eugenia Scabini (COFIN 2000–2002), and from the National Institute of Mental Health to Nancy Eisenberg.
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Di Giunta, L., Pastorelli, C., Eisenberg, N. et al. Developmental trajectories of physical aggression: prediction of overt and covert antisocial behaviors from self- and mothers’ reports. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry 19, 873–882 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-010-0134-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-010-0134-4