Child competence and psychiatric risk. II. Areas of relationship between child and family functioning

Teacher and peer ratings of 65 children at risk to schizophrenia and other severe psychopathology were divided into three behavioral domains: problem solving, social-emotional, and compliance. Each child area was then related to variables generated from a family consensus Rorschach procedure in an effort to gain a greater understanding of the mechanism of risk involvement. Within the problem solving domain, parental communication deviance, nonacknowledgment of comments, and clear communication were the three family variables which consistently and linearly related to child competence at school. In the social-emotional area, only parental communication deviance displayed a linear relationship to the child's functioning at school. No significant findings occurred in the area of compliance behavior, and the roles of age of child and child IQ did not influence any of the findings. The data indicated that parental communication deviance may be an important variable in risk involvement.