In the present study, three decades’ worth of reports of children’s conduct problems were combined with electronic medical records and administrative records of social service use and crime to describe the long-term public service costs associated with early-onset conduct-problems. Developmental subtypes of conduct problems were identified previously based on parent, teacher, self, and informant reports (Odgers et al., 2007). The conduct-problem subtypes included: children with early-onset and persistently high levels of conduct problems (on the life-course persistent pathway), children who experienced elevated levels of conduct problems only in childhood (on the childhood-limited pathway), only in adolescence (adolescence-onset pathway), or never (the low pathway) (see Figure 1), with subtypes mapping onto a widely used developmental taxonomy of childhood versus adolescent-onset conduct problems (Moffitt, 1993; Moffitt et al., 2008). Information from electronic medical records and administrative data was integrated to test the following questions.
