| Popis: |
Writing the concluding chapter for an authoritative, edited handbook on Disruptive Behavior Disorders (DBD) is both challenging and daunting. Our task, which involves appraising the status of research practices in this domain, invites a host of “big questions”: Where is the field? How much substantive progress have we made in such crucial issues as understanding etiology, elucidating underlying processes, predicting long-term outcomes, or mapping the outcomes of intervention techniques? At an applied level, do our developmental trajectories, multiple-risk-factor models, and ever more sophisticated data analytic strategies stand any chance of influencing policy that might stem the rising tide of youth violence in the United States?* More basically, are we even headed in the right directions; that is, can our current research models yield predictive and explanatory success? In all, the prevalence, impairment, and destructive nature of DBD (Barkley, 1996; Hinshaw & Anderson, 1996; Stoff, Breiling, & Maser, 1997) mandate that our science carefully scrutinize its conceptual bases and practices. |
