Youth psychopathology: Universal or culture-specific? Testing the syndrome models of youth self-report in Chinese population.

Problem: The debate on whether psychiatric symptoms are universal and to what extent they are affected by culture is generally divided between the universalist and relativist approaches.

Methods: This study compared Achenbach/Rescorla's model and Weisz's model of youth self-report in 2521 Chinese adolescents (mean age = 12 years). Indigenous exploratory factor analyses were conducted to explore the factor structure of youth self-report (YSR), and the derived models were tested with confirmatory factor analysis.