Accelerating longitudinal research on child psychopathology: A practical example.

Accelerated longitudinal analyses link longitudinal data obtained for multiple birth cohorts. The authors used these analyses to determine whether longitudinal data obtained on children in 1 cohort could predict outcomes of psychopathology in another cohort. Seven cohorts of Dutch children were assessed 5 times at 2-year intervals. The authors matched individual subjects from different cohorts on Child Behavior Checklist total problem scores at 2 ages. Over 2-, 4-, and 6-year intervals, between-cohort correlations were nearly as high as within-cohort correlations. However, between-cohort correlations were only similar to within-cohort correlations when they included at least 1 of the 2 ages at which subjects were matched