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Youth self-reports are a mainstay of delinquency assessment; however, making valid inferences about delinquency using these assessments requires equivalent measurement across groups of theoretical interest. We examined whether a brief 10-item delinquency measure exhibited measurement invariance across non-Hispanic White ( n = 6,064) and Black ( n = 1,666) youth (ages 10-11 years old) in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development sm Study (ABCD Study®). We detected differential item functioning (DIF) in two items. Black youth were more likely to report being arrested or picked up by police than White youth with the same score on the latent delinquency trait. Although multiple covariates (income, urgency, and callous-unemotional traits) reduced mean-level difference in overall delinquency, they were generally unrelated to the DIF in the Arrest item. However, the DIF in the Arrest item was reduced in size and no longer significant after adjusting for neighborhood safety. Results illustrate the importance of considering measurement invariance when using self-reported delinquency scores to draw inferences about group differences, and the utility of measurement invariance analyses for helping to identify mechanisms that contribute to group differences generally., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Casual sex, although common in college culture, can increase the risk of sexual victimization, which in turn can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study examined sexual victimization, self-esteem, and social support as relative predictors of PTSD and risky casual sex (RCS) in a sample of 229 female undergraduates. Results suggested that enhancing self-esteem may have a greater relative impact on PTSD symptoms compared with social support, even after accounting for the impact of sexual victimization. Moreover, a reduction in PTSD symptoms may have the potential to minimize RCS. Future research is needed to determine temporal relations among these variables.

The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is a method in which trained observers continuously code the dominance and warmth of individuals who interact with one another in dyads. This method has significant promise for assessing dynamic interpersonal processes. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of individual sex, dyadic familiarity, and situational conflict on patterns of interpersonal warmth, dominance, and complementarity as assessed via CAID. We used six samples with 603 dyads, including two samples of unacquainted mixed-sex undergraduates interacting in a collaborative task, two samples of couples interacting in both collaborative and conflict tasks, and two samples of mothers and children interacting in both collaborative and conflict tasks. Complementarity effects were robust across all samples, and individuals tended to be relatively warm and dominant. Results from multilevel models indicated that women were slightly warmer than men, whereas there were no sex differences in dominance. Unfamiliar dyads and dyads interacting in more collaborative tasks were relatively warmer, more submissive, and more complementary on warmth but less complementary on dominance. These findings speak to the utility of the CAID method for assessing interpersonal dynamics and provide norms for researchers who use the method for different types of samples and applications.

A large proportion of the public health costs of alcohol use disorder (AUD) can be accounted for by a small percentage of severe cases with a chronic course starting in adolescence and persisting into adulthood. However, chronicity may be a less effective marker of AUD severity in women than men due to a gender risk-severity paradox wherein comparable levels of risk exposure yield more co-occurring problems for women than men with AUD. To model this paradox, we compared trajectories of alcohol and drug use problems, depression symptoms, and antisocial behavior from ages 17 to 29 in men and women with a persistent, desistent, or no history of AUD. Problems followed a quadratic trajectory (i.e., increases followed by decreases), with gender and AUD chronicity moderating age-related change. Specifically, persistent and desistent courses differentiated the severity of problems more effectively in men while chronicity had less utility for differentiating AUD severity in women.

The current study examined the psychometric characteristics of the Chinese translation of the Marital Satisfaction Inventory-Revised (MSI-R) in a community sample of 117 couples from Taiwan. The Chinese MSI-R demonstrated moderate to strong internal consistency. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed similar scale factor structures in the Taiwanese and U.S. standardization samples. Mean profile comparisons between the current Taiwanese sample and the original MSI-R standardization sample revealed statistically significant but small differences on several subscales. Overall, the psychometric characteristics of the Chinese MSI-R lend support to its use with couples from diverse cultural backgrounds whose sole or preferred language is Chinese. It may also be appropriate to use the MSI-R in clinical settings for prevention or intervention efforts directed at Chinese-speaking couples. The implications of these findings for clinical and research purposes are discussed., (© The Author(s) 2015.)