Les failles dans la prediction des troubles de comportements externalises et Internalises a la periode prescolaire: L'utilite des residus standardises dans l'identification de sous-groupes heterogenes

摘要

Traditionally, most longitudinal studies have employed variable-oriented designs restricting all children to a single group pathway yielding contradictory results about developmental trends throughout childhood. The identification of heterogeneous groups of individuals might provide a better understanding of the change processes and early childhood variables that tend to deflect life-course trajectories away from a hypothesized pathway. These are characterized by residual cases, or more concretely, the differences between observed and expected values predicted by substantive and statistical methods in the social science literature. The main objective of this thesis was to explore the use of a counterintuitive person-oriented approach in order to better characterize these clusters of individuals within a developmental psychopathology perspective.;For the first article, an expected pathway model of aggression, guided by a theoretical framework, was generated to obtain standardized residuals. Results indicate the presence of two clusters of individuals following different pathways from the majority of the studied sample. The first is constituted of individuals with increasing physically aggressive behavior from early infancy to school entry. The second unexpected cluster is characterized by individuals with increasing hyperactive behavior throughout childhood. In the second article, we analyzed residual cases from a prediction equation driven by previous empirical work emphasizing the role of individual and parental characteristics in the development of anxiety by school entry. Once again, our findings indicate the presence of two clusters of individuals following unexpected pathways. The first is constituted of individuals with increasing hyperactive and emotionally distressed behaviors from early infancy to school entry. The second unexpected cluster is characterized specifically by separation anxiety around kindergarten and school entry years.;Keywords: physical aggression, anxiety, standardized residuals, developmental pathways, preschool.