Child sex was measured at age 5 as male=0, female=1. Children’s ethnicity was reported at age 5 as European American, African American, or “other.” Ethnicity was dummy coded into two variables (variable name in italics): 1) African American=1, European American=0, other ethnicity=0 and 2) other ethnicity=1, European American=0, African American=0. Socioeconomic status (SES) was measured by the Hollingshead four-factor index (Hollingshead, 1975) when the children were 5 years old, based on parents’ education and occupational status. Because prior studies have shown that the effect of SES on externalizing problems is accounted for by more proximal aspects of socialization (Dodge et al., 1994), we partialed out the variance of specific early childhood risk factors, e.g., the child’s exposure to violence, harsh discipline, and positive parenting, from SES in order to determine how (i.e., by which processes) SES affects risk for externalizing problems. SES was residualized for the collective risk models by regressing SES on the other risk factors at age 5 that were significant predictors of SES and saving the residuals to render the residualized SES term independent of the other early childhood risk factors.
