Measuring puberty and understanding its impact: A longitudinal study of adolescent twins

Pubertal development is an important focus of current biopsychosocial resea rch. The Pubertal Development Scale or PDS (Petersen, Crockett, Richards, a nd Boxer J. Youth Adolesc. (1988) 17: 117-133) has become a widely used mea sure in school-based and longitudinal research, because it incorporates sev eral indices of pubertal development. This study reports normative data on the PDS for two population-based birth cohorts of Finnish twin boys and gir ls, assessed at ages 11-12 and 14. Additionally, we report longitudinal ana lyses of the associations between pubertal development and substance use, s uggesting that the impact of pubertal timing is more complex than previousl y reported; associations commonly assumed between pubertal development and substance use held only for those whose developmental level, relative to pe ers, remained stable across follow-up. Finally we report twin correlations for the PDS which suggest that sibling similarity for pubertal development arises from both shared genes and shared environments and that the patterns of these influences vary between sexes and across time.