Mothers and fathers (if available) reported on their own lifetime antisocial behavior and alcohol problems on separate scales at the target child’s age 16 assessment. It would have been ideal to use a measure of parental antisocial behavior that was collected prior to adolescents’ externalizing outcome data, but these data were not available in the CDP sample. Accordingly, we used the following lifetime antisocial behavior and alcohol problems measures as global indices of parental externalizing problems, and assume, based on high levels of continuity of externalizing problems from childhood to adulthood (Odgers et al., 2008; Petersen, Bates, Dodge, Lansford, & Pettit, in press; Pitkanen, Kokko, Lyyra, & Pulkkinen, 2008) that parents’ antisocial behavior and alcohol problems antedated life events and adolescents’ externalizing.
