Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends

{n “title”: “Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends”,n “content”: “

Abstract

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The Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends (PRCCF) is a brief, specialized psychometric instrument designed to evaluate parental perceptions of their child’s peer affiliations, focusing specifically on deviant peer association, rule-breaking behaviors, and perceived negative peer influence. Developed in 1990 by the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG) as part of the longitudinal Fast Track Project, the instrument assesses the social ecology of children and adolescents at risk for externalizing disorders and conduct problems. Comprising 10 items, the PRCCF utilizes a multi-target structural approach that systematically evaluates a focal youth’s first best friend (items 1–3), second best friend (items 4–6), broader peer network (items 7–9), and global frequency of hanging around with delinquent peers (item 10). Items 1 through 9 are scored on a 4-point response scale ranging from 1 (\”Very much\”) to 4 (\”Not at all\”), while item 10 utilizes a 5-point frequency scale ranging from 1 (\”Never\”) to 5 (\”All the time\”). Psychometric evaluations within both normative and high-risk epidemiological samples demonstrate that the measure possesses robust structural integrity, yielding a total parental concern composite with high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .87 in high-risk samples and .88 in normative samples). Three underlying core subscales emerge across targets: Trouble with Adults (α = .58 to .67), Parental Disapproval of Friends (α = .65 to .69), and Parental Concern Over Negative Influence (α = .68). The instrument exhibits substantial predictive validity regarding adolescent substance initiation, antisocial behavior, and juvenile justice contact, serving as an essential tool for developmental psychopathology, family assessment, and targeted preventive interventions.

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Keywords

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Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends, PRCCF, Deviant Peer Affiliation, Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, Fast Track Project, Parental Monitoring, Externalizing Behavior, Peer Contagion, Adolescent Delinquency, Psychometrics

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Authors

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The Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends was developed by the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG) in 1990. The CPPRG is an interdisciplinary collaborative consortium comprising prominent clinical psychologists and developmental criminologists:

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• Karen L. Bierman, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University.

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• John D. Coie, Ph.D. (late) – Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University.

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• Kenneth A. Dodge, Ph.D. – Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University.

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• Mark T. Greenberg, Ph.D. – Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, The Pennsylvania State University.

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• John E. Lochman, Ph.D., ABPP – Department of Psychology, The University of Alabama.

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• Robert J. McMahon, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

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Inquiries regarding the Fast Track Project assessment battery can be directed to the Fast Track Data Center or instrument coordinators such as Pamela K. Ahrens through the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy.

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Purpose

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The primary purpose of the Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends is to systematically capture parental awareness, perceptions, and evaluations of deviance within their child’s proximal social circle. A substantial body of developmental literature has documented that association with antisocial or rule-breaking peers constitutes one of the most proximal and potent risk factors for the escalation of youth conduct disorder, delinquency, school dropout, and substance misuse. Despite the diagnostic importance of peer context, youths with emerging externalizing tendencies frequently underreport or minimize the problem behaviors of their peer group due to social desirability or peer loyalty. Conversely, independent direct observations of adolescent friendship networks are often ecologically unfeasible.

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The PRCCF resolves this methodological challenge by leveraging the parent as an observational informant. Parents occupy a unique vantage point: while they may not witness every peer interaction, they possess contextual awareness regarding household rules, community complaints, school disciplinary notices, and their own intuitive evaluations of their child’s companions. The PRCCF was specifically calibrated to address both clinical assessment and research screening needs:

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• Epidemiological and Longitudinal Research: Identifying shifts in peer ecology from middle childhood through adolescence, particularly during major developmental transitions (e.g., the transition from elementary to middle school) when peer influence dramatically increases.

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• Targeted Prevention and Intervention Planning: Gauging whether intervention efforts—such as parent management training (PMT) or peer-group restructuring—effectively enhance parental supervision and reduce exposure to deviant peer networks.

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• Risk Stratification: Differentiating youths who maintain friendships with normative, prosocial peers from those embedded in delinquent, antisocial peer networks that amplify delinquency via peer contagion or \”deviance training.\”

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Psychological Construct

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The PRCCF assesses the multidimensional construct of perceived deviant peer affiliation and parental apprehension. Within developmental psychopathology, this construct is defined not merely by whether a youth possesses friends, but by the qualitative behavioral characteristics of those friends and the degree of friction their presence introduces into the family microsystem. The instrument models this construct across three target categories: the youth’s primary best friend, secondary best friend, and wider peer group, terminating in a global estimate of exposure to delinquent youth. Across these domains, three distinct functional dimensions are measured:

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1. Trouble with Adults (Institutional Rule Violations)

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This dimension examines whether the child’s friends demonstrate externalizing behavioral patterns that cross institutional boundaries into formal conflict with authority figures, specifically teachers, school administrators, and law enforcement personnel. A child affiliating with peers who openly violate structural norms is at an elevated risk of secondary deviance, as authority figures increasingly categorize the peer dyad as high-risk, precipitating exclusionary school disciplinary actions or surveillance by justice systems.

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2. Parental Disapproval of Friends (Value and Behavioral Incongruence)

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This subscale gauges the extent to which friends engage in behaviors, exhibit attitudes, or participate in subcultural practices that directly clash with parental expectations, household values, and moral frameworks. Parental disapproval functions as an index of systemic discord; when a child cultivates intimate friendships with individuals who violate family expectations, parental authority is undermined, often sparking familial conflict, reciprocal hostility, and parent-child alienation.

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3. Parental Concern Over Negative Influence (Perceived Peer Contagion)

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This dimension operationalizes the parent’s subjective evaluation of peer contagion risk. Rather than evaluating the friend’s standalone behavior, this facet assesses the parent’s apprehension that the friend actively serves as a behavioral catalyst, modeling antisocial strategies, encouraging substance experimentation, or eroding the target child’s prosocial self-regulation. Heightened parental concern reflects an overt parental perception of environmental vulnerability.

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4. Global Peer Delinquency Exposure

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Captured via Item 10, this univariate dimension provides an omnibus estimate of the target youth’s immersion in deviant peer subcultures (\”kids who get into trouble\”). It contextualizes the dyadic ratings by capturing the sheer frequency of exposure to unstructured, deviant socializing contexts.

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Theoretical Framework

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The conceptual foundation of the PRCCF integrates principles from several foundational paradigms in social development and behavioral psychology:

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1. Patterson’s Coercion Theory and the Oregon Model

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In Gerald Patterson’s coercion model of delinquency (see Patterson et al., 1992), early-starting conduct problems originate within the home via coercive family interaction cycles. When these children enter formal schooling, their antisocial demeanor frequently leads to academic deficits and rejection by prosocial peers. Systematically marginalized from normative peer groups, these youths drift into mutual affiliation with other rejected, aggressive peers. Thomas Dishion and colleagues conceptualized this phenomenon as deviance training—a positive reinforcement mechanism whereby delinquent peers validate, laugh at, and encourage rule violations, dramatically accelerating the child’s trajectory toward chronic delinquency.

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2. The Social Development Model

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Formulated by Hawkins and Catalano, the Social Development Model synthesizes social control theory, social learning theory, and differential association theory. It posits that bonding to prosocial agents (parents, prosocial peers, school) acts as an inhibitor of delinquency. When the primary bonding shifts toward antisocial peers who provide direct models and opportunities for deviance, the child adopts antisocial beliefs. The PRCCF measures the extent to which these bonding dynamics have shifted into high-risk peer channels from the observer perspective of the parent.

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3. The Parental Monitoring and Knowledge Paradigm

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Historically, parental monitoring was operationalized purely as active tracking and surveillance. However, revisions introduced by Stattin and Kerr emphasized that parental knowledge is largely driven by youth voluntary disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental observation. The PRCCF operates on the premise that parents synthesize multiple indirect and direct cues to construct a working mental model of their child’s social network. When parental awareness reveals delinquent associations, it indicates either a failure of monitoring boundaries or an adolescent whose deviance has expanded beyond home containment.

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Validity

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The psychometric validity of the Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends has been extensively examined within the multi-site longitudinal evaluation of the Fast Track Project, alongside adaptations within community compendiums (e.g., Latino Families and Youth: A Compendium of Assessment Tools).

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Construct and Structural Validity

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Construct validity is evidenced by the consistent factor pattern observed across heterogeneous cohorts. The three core behavioral facets (Trouble with Adults, Disapproval, and Perceived Concern) replicate across targets (Best Friend 1, Best Friend 2, Wider Peer Group). Factor structures confirm that parental assessments successfully discriminate between normative friend eccentricity and active antisocial involvement.

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Convergent Validity

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The PRCCF demonstrates statistically significant convergent correlations with related collateral measures. High composite scores on the PRCCF correlate positively with:

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• Teacher-Reported Externalizing Problems: Assessed via the Teacher’s Report Form (TRF) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), yielding moderate convergent validity coefficients (r ranging from .32 to .48, p < .001).

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• Peer Sociometric Nominations: Negative correlations with peer acceptance and positive correlations with peer nominations for \”starts fights\” and \”breaks rules\” (r = .28 to .41).

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• Child Self-Reported Deviance: Moderate positive associations with the child’s own self-reported involvement with delinquent peers, demonstrating cross-informant concordance while capturing unique variance specific to the home-school nexus.

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Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

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Longitudinal predictive validity is one of the instrument’s strongest psychometric attributes. Elevated PRCCF baseline scores in late childhood (Grades 4–5) prospectively predict:

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• Substance initiation (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana) by early to mid-adolescence (odds ratios typically ranging between 1.65 and 2.40).

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• Formal juvenile justice arrests and contact with law enforcement by age 18.

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• Increases in parent-child relational conflict and diminished parental monitoring efficacy over time.

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Discriminant Validity

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The PRCCF displays satisfactory discriminant validity against non-behavioral childhood internalizing problems (such as isolated somatic complaints or pure separation anxiety), confirming that the tool specifically measures social-ecological deviance rather than general emotional distress or non-specific parental negativity.

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Reliability

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The PRCCF demonstrates solid internal consistency across both high-risk clinical/targeted samples and representative normative epidemiological samples, as established in Fast Track psychometric analyses:

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Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

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Reliability estimates documented in the Fast Track technical validation reports illustrate the instrument’s internal coherence across subscales and population tiers:

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• Total Parental Concern Composite:\n
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  • High-Risk Sample: α = .87

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  • Normative Sample: α = .88

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• Trouble with Adults Subscale:\n
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  • High-Risk Sample: α = .58

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  • Normative Sample: α = .67

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• Parental Disapproval of Friends Subscale:\n
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  • High-Risk Sample: α = .69

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  • Normative Sample: α = .65

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• Parental Concern Over Negative Influence Subscale:\n
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  • High-Risk Sample: α = .68

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  • Normative Sample: α = .68

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The lower alpha for \”Trouble with Adults\” in the high-risk sample (α = .58) is typical for low-base-rate, high-severity behavior items among younger cohorts where overt police or teacher sanctions have not yet fully crystallized across all members of a friend network. The total composite score demonstrates excellent reliability (> .85), making it well-suited for aggregate research and clinical indexing.

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Test-Retest Stability

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Across short-term test-retest intervals (2 to 4 weeks), stability coefficients remain high (r > .80). Longitudinal stability assessments indicate moderate, developmental stability (coefficients spanning .45 to .60 over one-year intervals), correctly mirroring normative fluctuations in peer friendship networks as youths transition between classrooms and schools.

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Factor Analysis

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Structural evaluations of the PRCCF using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) reveal a hierarchically organized measurement model. Due to the multi-target structure (Friend 1, Friend 2, Other Friends), analyses must account for both trait variance and target method variance.

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Factor Structure and Model Solutions

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When evaluated via EFA using principal axis factoring with promax rotation, items 1 through 9 consistently produce a robust three-factor solution representing the three conceptual dimensions:

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1. Factor 1: Negative Influence Concern (Items 3, 6, 9) – High factor loadings ranging from .65 to .83.

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2. Factor 2: Parental Disapproval (Items 2, 5, 8) – Factor loadings ranging from .61 to .79.

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3. Factor 3: Authority/Trouble Violations (Items 1, 4, 7) – Factor loadings ranging from .52 to .74.

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Alternative structural analyses configure the PRCCF as a higher-order model where the three first-order factors load onto a general latent factor of Perceived Deviant Peer Affiliation. In these higher-order CFA models, goodness-of-fit indices meet conventional standards:

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• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .94

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• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .92

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• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .058 (90% CI [.048, .068])

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• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .045

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Item 10 (\”How much does your son/daughter hang around with kids who get into trouble?\”) exhibits strong cross-loadings across all three domains and serves as an overarching general-factor marker, with standardized loadings onto the primary latent construct exceeding .70.

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Instrument / Measurement Tool

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• Test Name: Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends

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• Acronym: PRCCF

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• Original Authors: Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG), 1990

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• Target Population: Parents or primary caregivers of school-aged children and adolescents (typically ages 7–18)

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• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or structured telephone/in-person clinical interview

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• Total Item Count: 10 items

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• Time Required for Completion: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes

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• Target Architecture:\n
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  • Items 1–3: First best friend

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  • Items 4–6: Second best friend

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  • Items 7–9: Other friends / general peer group

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  • Item 10: Global frequency indicator

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• Response Categories:\n
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  • Items 1–9: 4-point Likert-type scale:\n
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    • 1 = Very much

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    • 2 = Somewhat

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    • 3 = A little

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    • 4 = Not at all

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  • Item 10: 5-point frequency scale:\n
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    • 1 = Never

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    • 2 = Almost never

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    • 3 = Some

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    • 4 = Frequently

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    • 5 = All the time

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• Scoring and Transformation Protocol:\n
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  • Standard scoring within the Fast Track Project utilizes dedicated SAS scoring macros available through the project archives.

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  • Directionality Note: In standard psychometric scoring routines, Items 1–9 are reverse-scored (4 becomes 1, 3 becomes 2, 2 becomes 3, 1 becomes 4) so that higher values consistently denote greater levels of peer deviance, parental disapproval, and concern.

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  • Subscale scores are typically computed as the mean or sum across the respective items: Trouble with Adults (Items 1, 4, 7), Disapproval (Items 2, 5, 8), and Negative Influence Concern (Items 3, 6, 9).

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  • A standardized total composite (Total Parental Concern) is calculated by standardizing and averaging all 10 items.

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Permissions & Fee and Test Year

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The Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends was developed in 1990 by the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG) under grant funding provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; grants R18MH48043, R18MH50951, R18MH50952, and R18MH50953) along with support from NIDA and the U.S. Department of Education.

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Licensing and Fee Structure: The instrument is classified in the public domain for non-commercial educational, academic, and clinical research purposes. No royalty fees or purchase authorizations are required to administer the instrument. Researchers and clinicians utilizing the instrument are expected to cite the original CPPRG documentation and the Fast Track Project repository. Automated scoring scripts (including the Fast Track SAS scoring code) and technical documentation are accessible via the Fast Track Project archive or compendia compiling public domain youth risk assessments.

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References

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• Bierman, K. L., Coie, J. D., Dodge, K. A., Greenberg, M. T., Lochman, J. E., McMahon, R. J., & Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group. (1999). Initial impact of the Fast Track prevention trial for conduct problems: I. The high-risk sample. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67(5), 631–647. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.67.5.631

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• Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG). (1990). Parent Report on Child’s Close Friends [Measurement instrument]. Fast Track Project. https://fasttrackproject.org

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• Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (CPPRG). (2002). Predictor models for adolescent conduct problems: Multiple disciplines, multiple paths. Development and Psychopathology, 14(4), 819–856. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457940200409X

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• Dishion, T. J., McCord, J., & Poulin, F. (1999). When interventions harm: Peer groups and problem behavior. American Psychologist, 54(9), 755–764. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.9.755

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• Orpinas, P. (2009). Latino Families and Youth: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. Pan American Health Organization & Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (pp. 93–94).

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• Patterson, G. R., Reid, J. B., & Dishion, T. J. (1992). Antisocial boys. Castalia Publishing Company.

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• Stattin, H., & Kerr, M. (2000). Parental monitoring: A reinterpretation. Child Development, 71(4), 1072–1085. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00210

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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)