Building a Model of Risk Factors for Psychopathology in Early Childhood

Psychological theories that are reasonably comprehensive and capable of being used to generate specific hypotheses can play an important role in guiding research. Rather than employing a hypothetico-deductive approach, theory building often relies on an abductive approach. This chapter discusses the taxonomic and dimensional approaches to conceptualizing and measuring psychopathology. The structure of psychopathology is concerned with how taxonomic categories or psychopathology dimensions are interrelated; these models include correlated factor, bi-factor, and transdiagnostic models. Following Theory Construction Methodology, an approach that relies on an abductive approach to theory building, we discuss the development of a multi-domain model of risk factors and their contribution to developing and maintaining psychopathology in young children. This process includes: (a) identifying the targets (anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, oppositional symptoms, symptoms of attention deficit disorders) and phenomena (i.e., associations between risk factors and targets and those between and within domains of risk factors) that need to be explained; (b) development of a prototheory derived from existing models of domains of risk; and (c) the development of a formal model based on principles of structural equation modeling to examine the relations of these various domains of risk factors and targeted dimensions of child psychopathology.