Because analyses used the accelerated longitudinal structure of these aggregate data (see Mehta & West, 2000), the mother-, father- and adolescent-report samples are described with respect to the underlying age distribution rather than assessment waves. Across MLS and AFDP, assessments of the target child’s externalizing symptom by any of the reporters were available on 1050 adolescents. Three samples were created to examine effects for each reporter of externalizing symptoms, with each sample including cases for whom at least one report of symptoms for that reporter was available between ages 2 and 17 (or between 10 and 17 for adolescent-reports). These criteria resulted in a sample of 1026 children from 781 families for mother-reported externalizing symptoms and 938 children from 712 families for the father-report sample. For the adolescent-report sample, we only included reports from AFDP because parent-reported alcohol-related symptoms were assessed jointly with adolescent-reported symptoms at only one to two time points in MLS. Thus, the adolescent-report sample consisted of 454 children who were not nested in family (by design). Demographic characteristics for these three samples are reported in Table 1.
