Taking this last approach, we found associations between the two disorders far less marked than might have been anticipated. The majority (55%) of CD cases never received a diagnosis of ODD. Less surprisingly, many children with ODD never met full criteria for CD. However, youth in these ‘pure’ diagnostic categories had higher levels of sub-threshold symptoms of the other diagnosis than children who were never diagnosed with CD or ODD. Viewed from another perspective, of all the CD cases only 9.2% had shown ODD at an earlier study wave. In general, however, the overall pattern of our findings was consistent with results from other epidemiological studies (Loeber et al., 2009) in showing that in community samples CD and ODD are less strongly associated than suggested by data from referred groups.
