Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESLatent Class Analysis of Child Behavior Checklist Anxiety/Depression in Children and Adolescents
Section snippets
Purpose of the Present Study
To assess the latent class structure of the Anxious/ Depressed (A/D) syndrome of the CBCL, we subjected the A/D items to LCA. If anxiety and depression problems are completely distinct entities, we expect LCA to identify three or four distinct classes of item groupings in both nonreferred and referred samples: a pure anxiety group, a pure depression group, and a group without many problems, as well as a possible fourth group with both anxiety and depression.
We analyzed two large samples of
Samples
The two samples of children and adolescents analyzed in this study have been described by Achenbach, 1991a, Achenbach, 1991b. In brief, the nonreferred sample assessed in 1991 included 100 males and 100 females at each age from 4 to 18 years, selected to be representative of the U.S. population in terms of ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), geographic region, and area of residence. A second sample of children referred for mental health services was obtained from 52 outpatient mental health
RESULTS
A two-class model did not fit any data set. Although models including four or more classes slightly improved the fit statistically, they created clinically uninformative classes (e.g., some classes included <1.0% of the sample). There was no change in the natural log as a function of the degrees of freedom between three-and four-class solutions, indicating that the three-class solution was the best fit to the data. Therefore, three-class solutions were preferred as providing the most meaningful
DISCUSSION
We found that the items on the A/D scale of the CBCL tend to co-occur as a cohesive set that reflects the complexity of affective problems among children and adolescents. Although variations in profiles emerged, we found no clear problem-specific classes indicative of anything other than a mixed A/D syndrome. The latent classes did not reveal patterns suggestive of separate anxiety or depressive disorders. Instead, each class showed a wide variety of traditionally “anxious” and “depressive”
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This work was supported by NIMH grant 40305.