(provided by candidate): This is an application for a K23 """"""""Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award"""""""". The candidate is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Health Evaluation Sciences, Psychology, and Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia with established clinical expertise in the assessment and treatment of sexually aggressive youth. Through the K23 award the candidate seeks to acquire additional substantive expertise and advanced research and analytic skills in support of conducting theoretically driven longitudinal research aimed at understanding clinically discrete subtypes of sexually aggressive youth and their differential developmental trajectories. The Career Development Plan revolves around enhanced skills and competencies in two major areas: 1) a theoretical understanding of the larger developmental context of youth perpetrated sexual aggression, and specific intrapersonal and systemic factors that explain its origins and manifestations; and 2) longitudinal research and data analytic methods. The Research Plan proposes to employ a combination of """"""""deductive-rational"""""""" and """"""""inductive-empirical"""""""" strategies to identify and define clinically discrete subtypes of sexually aggressive youth, and through longitudinal research assess hypothesized subtype-specific developmental trajectories. Original data will be collected on 300 adjudicated adolescent male sex offenders. The research is specifically aimed at exploring the presence of three hypothesized subtypes of sexually aggressive youth with differential developmental courses: 1) early childhood onset, """"""""life-course-persistent"""""""" antisocial youth that engage in aggressive sexual offenses (primarily against pubescent and post-pubescent females) as one form of violent, antisocial behavior; 2) adolescent-onset, non-paraphilic youth that engage in transient, non-violent sexual offending and delinquent behavior in association with low self-efficacy and emotional immaturity; and 3) early adolescent onset, sexually deviant (i.e. pronounced paraphilic interests) youth that target pre-pubescent children, primarily males) and are at risk for chronic patterns of sexual offending. Constructs utilized in the formulation of the prototypic subtypes reflect a bridging of developmental psychopathology and sexual aggression research, and the extension of Moffitt's typology of antisocial and delinquent youth (Moffitt, 1993) to the study of juvenile perpetrated sexual aggression.
