The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) in Iranian School-Attending Adolescents: A Multi-Informant Validation Study of the PSCD Parent- and Youth Self-Report Versions

Abstract

The Proposed Specifier for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) was developed to measure the broad psychopathy construct with grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive, and conduct disorder subscales. This study tested the psychometric properties of Persian parent-and-child self-report PSCD versions with 974 parents (86% mothers) and children/adolescents (46.5% boys) dyads. Results showed that with some modifications the proposed hierarchical four-factor structure for both PSCDs was confirmed and was found to be invariant across gender. Across versions, all PSCD scores were internally consistent and demonstrated expected correlations with parent-reported externalizing problems, anxiety/depression, and poor school performance, supporting the PSCDs scores’ validity. This study also is the first to examine and establish acceptable to excellent parent-child agreement of PSCD scores. Finally, all PSCD child-report scores offered small though significant incremental validity over their corresponding PSCD parent-version scores in predicting parent-reported conduct problems and proactive aggression. Findings indicated that both Persian PSCDs may hold promise for assessing psychopathy components in Iranian school-attending adolescents and generating additional research on this topic.

Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate all the people who helped us with the planning of the study and the data collection and the adolescent boys and girls who voluntarily participated in this study.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

There was no conflict of interest in this study.

Ethics statement

This study was approved by the ethics committee of the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences (code number: IR.USWR.REC.1400.228).

Funding

This study was not supported financially.

Notes

1 To facilitate comparison with prior work on this 13-item model with the parent version (Luo et al., 2021) or self-report version (López-Romero et al., 2022), we repeated all the analyses described in this section “Data Analyses” with the Persian PSCD-PV and PSCD-SR 13-item version. The model generally showed good fit to the data. Results of these analyses could be retrieved from the Supplementary material but will not be reflected upon in the Results and Discussion.

2 We also conducted Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEMs) to test the factor structure of the PSCD-PV and PSCD-SR and whether the items loaded meaningfully on their hypothesized factors. However, ESEMs did not result in the structure we expected based on theory and prior studies. Therefore, we proceeded with the hierarchical four-factor CFA model which is also supported in prior studies. Our choice of model is in line with the recommendations of Sellbom and Tellegen (2019). Accordingly, the limitations of ESEM should be considered when testing and selecting the factor structure models. For instance, in ESEM, all items are freely estimated to load on each of the factors, which could result in a factor structure substantially different from the one the researcher was attempting to confirm. Also, more weight should be given to theory in model selection while also considering statistical results.