Per the recommendations of MacKinnon et al. (2002), we tested for the indirect effect of parental externalizing problems on adolescents’ externalizing using tests of the joint significance of two pathways: parental externalizing problems predicting life events and life events predicting subsequent adolescent externalizing while simultaneously controlling for parental externalizing problems3. The generic LMM model used to test each of these pathways (expressed in hierarchical linear model [HLM] form) was:
