J. M. Lessem1, J. K. Hewitt1, L. J. Eaves2, J. L. Silberg2, M. Rutter3, E. Simonoff3.
The Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent Behavioral Development includes self report data and parental report data on life events for adolescent twins. Though generally children and parents agree on which life events occurred and which did not occur, children and parents on average disagree on the occurence of two events out of 39 possible events on a modified form of the Johnson and McCutcheon Life Event Checklist. The variance of discrepancies can be broken down into shared and non-shared environmental components, though the shared environmental component may be due to bias, because only one mother and father responds for both twins, while the children answer only for themselves. This report examines the nature of the discrepancies between multiple respondents to the same life events questionnaire at two time points, 18 months apart.
Address: University of Colorado, Campus Box 447, Boulder, CO 80309-0447, 303-492-2843, 303-492-8063 (fax), Jeff.Lessem+BGA@Colorado.EDU, http://ibgwww.Colorado. EDU/~lessem
1Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0447. 2Department of Human Genetics, Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, VA \ 23298. 3MRC Child Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, London, UK. 4Supported by PHS Grant MH45268.