Adolescent psychopathology as a function of informant and risk status

Adolescents selected for delinquency risk in a community study, their parents, and teachers completed versions of the Child Behavior Checklist, with the raw scores representing the adolescents' level of psychopathology. All three informants rated high risk adolescents as showing higher levels of delinquency as well as other forms of psychopathology, particularly anxiety, aggression, social problems, thought problems, and, to a slightly less consistent extent, withdrawn behavior. In addition, compared with parents and adolescents, teachers rated psychopathology in African-American adolescents higher than that in Anglo-American adolescents. The results are analyzed using knowledge drawn from social and child psychiatry.