The study will examine changes in adolescents as they become young adults. Two hundred adolescents will be selected from a large longitudinal cohort for the presence of high and low risk characteristics during childhood and adolescence, over sampling for large positive and negative changes in their symptoms of personality disorder. Narrative histories of events and transitions reflecting the dynamic processes occurring during post high school years will be collected via semistructured interviews of the young adults and their maternal caretakers. Another two hundred youth ages 17-23 will be newly sampled from the same census tracks that gave rise to the original sample. The new subjects will be interviewed annually in a prospective fashion about the same transitions on which retrospective data is being collected in the original sample. The same data will be elicited retrospectively of this prospective cohort at the end of the study period. Growth curve components of both transition level and qualitative aspects of the transitions (agency, challenge, identification, mastery, expectations) will be analyzed as outcomes of the earlier symptoms and risks and as predictors of change in personality disorder symptoms. Information from the new random sample will be used to ascertain the presence of retrospective distortion in the reporting of events.
