COMORBIDITY OF BEHAVIORAL, EMOTIONAL, AND COGNITIVE PROBLEMS IN ADOLESCENCE

The purpose of this study was to examine in a sample of 11,516 seconda ry school students the extent to which different behavioral, emotional and cognitive problems (a) reflected one or more underlying common fa ctors; (b) ''actually'' cooccurred; and (c) were ''single'' problems, Principal Component Analyses were performed and percentagewise techniq ues were used. PCA demonstrated that one or more ''general syndromes'' could not by far account for all of the variance of the variables, Th e results suggest the existence of adolescent ''subgroups'' with diver gent comorbidity patterns: those who primarily report one ''single'' s ymptom; those who report concurrent symptoms either exclusively in the category of behavioral problems or exclusively in the category of emo tional and cognitive problems; and those who report concurrent symptom s in both categories. This distinction between different subgroups has important theoretical, diagnostic, and treatment implications.