A psychiatric epidemiology survey of children in Puerto Rico aged 4 through 16 years was completed in May 1986. This survey utilized the same sampling frame as a previous epidemiologic survey of the adult population carried out one year before. A large proportion of the two samples includes a dyad for which diagnostic data is available on both a parent and a child in the same household. This affords a unique opportunity to study the relationship between parental and child disorder. The child study followed a two stage design in which the Child Behavior Checklist was used as a screening instrument on a probability sample representative of the child population of the entire island, with subsequent in depth diagnostic evaluation of the children who screened positive as well as a proportion of the negative screens. This second stage assessment included the administration and coding of the NIMH-DISC. The available data includes coded DISC's on all 386 children in the second stage sample, as well as variables that refer to a large number of possible risk factors of childhood psychopathology. The DISC data lends itself to the empirical derivation of continuous diagnostic measures that are likely to have greater predictive power than categorical diagnoses. We propose to carry out analyses on the existing data that had not been previously contemplated. These include the empirical derivation of continuous measures of psychopathology through factor analysis of the DISC data, further study of the association between parental and childhood disorder as well as of other risk factors of psychopathology through the use of multiple regression and path analysis, and a methodologic exploration of the epidemiologic measurement of """"""""caseness"""""""" in the community. The results of this research will be of scientific significance to the field of epidemiology, as well as of practical use, since they will provide empirical data useful in defining diagnostic categories and identifying risk factors of childhood psychopathology which will inform clinical psychiatry and the developers of nosological systems.
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