Family discord and conduct disorder: Cause, consequence, or correlate?

The inferences to be drawn from statistical associations between family discord and conduct disorder in children are discussed with respect to the need to differentiate between risk indicators and risk mechanisms, the conceptualization of risk mechanisms, measurement issues, and the research strategies needed to test causal hypotheses. Such testing needs to indicate genetic research strategies, as well as to focus on children's effects on parents, person-environment interactions, nonshared environmental effects, causal chain effects, and the need to use natural experiments. The background to the current interest in the effects on children of marital conflict derives from the old observation that broken homes are associated with delinquency. Following Wootton's (1959) scathing critique of this field of research, studies in the 1960s and 1970s showed that the main risks accompanied divorce or separation, rather than parental death, and it was suggested that family conflict, not separation as such, might constitute the key risk factor (Rutter, 1971). The finding that conflict and discord in intact families also carried a raised risk of psychopatholo gy was consistent with the hypothesis, as were findings in the 1980s that the psychological risks associated with divorce preceded family breakup (Block, Block, Cherlin et al., 1991). Subsequent evidence that continuing conflict between parents postdivorce was also associated with psychopathology in children if they felt caught in the conflict also suggests that the risk mechanisms involve conflict in some way (Buchanan, Maccoby, Hetherington, 1989, 1991).