Validating the Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) in Iranian Justice-Involved Youths: A Multi-Informant Study of Parent and Youth Self-Report Versions

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) is a tool designed to measure psychopathy through its grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive, and conduct disorder subscales. The present study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the PSCD's parent and child self-report versions with a sample of 149 justice-involved youths (55% boys) and their parents (71% mothers) in Iran. Results indicated that both versions of the PSCD confirmed the originally proposed hierarchical four-factor structure. Internal consistency of both PSCD versions' component scores was satisfactory, and correlations with theoretically related variables supported the PSCD scores' validity. Also, good to excellent agreement between parent and child PSCD scores were found. The parent-report PSCD scores offered significant incremental validity over the child-version scores in predicting child-reported conduct problems, proactive aggression, and delinquency. Furthermore, both informant versions of the PSCD provided significant added values over an alternate measure of youth psychopathy in predicting externalizing psychopathology. The findings suggest that both versions of the PSCD are useful for assessing psychopathy subscales in Iranian justice-involved adolescents and hold promise for generating further research on this topic.