Our measurement approach did not include a comparable measure of social competence across the two waves of assessment during adolescence as we had obtained during childhood. The results of the cascade model may have been altered had we been able to incorporate social competence indicators during adolescence. In addition, our measures of adolescent psychopathology and substance use were obtained through self-report, and the findings may have been enhanced if other methods of assessment were obtained. It also would have been beneficial had we been able to incorporate an ascertainment of parental substance use disorders into our developmental model in order to interweave this prominent risk factor into our findings. Finally, the complexity of our cascade model would likely have been increased had a consideration of the diversity of maltreatment experiences (i.e., variation in the subtypes of maltreatment, severity, chronicity, and developmental timing) been investigated; attention to this variation should be addressed in subsequent investigations.
