Correlated and coupled within-person change in emotional and behavioral disturbance in individuals with intellectual disability

Individual change and variation in emotional/behavioral disturbance in children and adolescents with intellectual disability has received little empirical investigation. Based on 11 years of longitudinal data from the Australian Child to Adult Development Study, we report associations among individual differences in level, rate of change, and occasion-specific variation across subscales of the Developmental Behavior Checklist (DBC) with 506 participants who had intellectual disability and were ages 5 to 19 years at study entry. Correlations among the five DBC subscales ranged from .43 to .66 for level, .43 to .88 for rate of change, and .31 to .61 for occasion-specific variation, with the highest correlations observed consistently between disruptive, self-absorbed, and communication disturbance behaviors. These interdependencies among dimensions of emotional/behavioral disturbance provide insight into the developmental dynamics of psychopauhology from childhood through young adulthood.