Exploring the factors influencing conduct problems

Abstract

Background: Conduct problems have become one of the major concerns in the recent times. If untreated, these symptoms could form into intractable psychopathology like Personality Disorder (PD). A recent surge in the number of juvenile delinquency affirmed the presence of conduct problem amongst Bangladeshi adolescents. Previous findings indicated a range of factors had an association with conduct problems including parenting, substance abuse and crime rates in the neighbourhood. Nonetheless, very little is known in the context of Bangladesh. Objective: To find out the association between different factors (Individual, parenting, family and environmental) and conduct problems. Methods: 165 (Mean age 13.39, age range 8-16, 82% male) children with conduct problems were recruited alongside their parents from different institutes in Dhaka. We developed a checklist for assessing the conduct problems by following DSM and ICD diagnostic criteria. We administered semi-structured questionnaires with Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) and The Brief Family Relationship Scales (BFRS) to ascertain the level and presence of different factors. We assessed 19 factors altogether. By following the previous studies and theoretical structures, we clustered these factors into four domains by following previous theoretical framework. Results: We conducted a series of Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) to obtain the association. The last of the analyses was a stepwise MRA; the model statistics revealed child and parents reported history of substance abuse, parents and child reported high crime neighbourhood, recent changes in society, and family conflict explained the most variance (R 0.38, F= 4.85, p=0.03). All of these factors obtained significant associations with conduct problems, amongst them, parents and child reported history of substance abuse obtained the highest association (ß=0.51, t=7.39, p=0.00). Conclusion: Our findings corroborated with previous findings from western societies. It suggested these factors could be utilised as the potential target for conduct problems prevention in Bangladesh.