central importance of this construct for externalizing behavior and because of the availability of data on parental monitoring for both samples, we do not necessarily believe that the environmental moderation associated with CHRM2 is limited to parental monitoring. Rather, we believe that parental monitoring, although an important variable in itself (Latendresse et al., 2008), is likely to be a proxy for many correlated parenting variables and provides general information about the nature and quality of the adolescent’s environment. For example, in the CDP sample, parental monitoring is significantly correlated with measures of peer deviance and neighborhood safety. Future work will be devoted to exploring the nature of the environmental variables that might be relevant to the interaction effect observed in the present study.
