Grouping Youth With Similar Symptoms: A Person-Centered Approach to Transdiagnostic Subgroups

The present study extracted symptom profiles based on parent and youth report on a broad symptom checklist. Profiles based on parent-reported symptoms were compared to those based on adolescent self-report to clarify discrepancies.

The current study used archival data from 1,269 youth and parent dyads whose youth received services at a community mental health center. The mean age of the sample was 14.31 years (standard deviation = 1.98), and the youth sample was half male (50.1%) and primarily Caucasian (86.8%). Latent profile analysis was used to extract models based on parent and self-reported emotional and behavioral problems.

Results indicated that a 5-class solution was the best fitting model for youth-reported symptoms and an adequate fit for parent-reported symptoms. For 46.5% of the sample, class membership matched for both parent and youth.

Latent profile analysis provides an alternative method for exploring transdiagnostic subgroups within clinic-referred samples.