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Edited by Marilyn McShane and Frank P. Williams III
   

   
Mental Health and Violent Youth: A Developmental/Lifecourse Perspective
   

Denise Paquette Boots

       
   

Using prospective, longitudinal data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), Boots gauges the temporal impact of childhood and adolescent mental health problems on the development of serious offending behaviors in boys. She converts data from both parent and teacher reports of psychopathological problems to create DSM-oriented scales for Oppositional Defiant, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity, Anxiety, and Affective Problems. When compared to DSM diagnoses, these scales offer an innovative and more continuous form of measurement with distinctions between normal, borderline, and clinical levels of these mental health problems. Regression analyses across 24 models indicate that three different teacher-reported DSM-oriented mental health problems emerged at three different stages of development as significant predictors of serious violence over the lifecourse.

       
  Denise Paquette Boots received her Ph.D. in Criminology in 2006 from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her research and teaching interests focus on homicide and violence, with a specific emphasis on lifecourse/developmental criminology, domestic violence, mental health, youth crime and parricide, the death penalty, criminal victimization, and psychosocial explanations of crime.
       
    xii, 260 pages. Index, bibliography. ISBN 978-1-59332-231-1 (casebound)
$70. Published 2007.