The linkage between mental health, delinquency, and trajectories of delinquency: Results from the Boricua Youth Study.

Purpose: To examine the longitudinal relationship between depression, delinquency, and trajectories of delinquency among Hispanic children and adolescents.

Methods: Propensity score matching is used to match depressed and non-depressed youth and a combination of group-based trajectory and multinomial logistic regression techniques are used.

Results: After adjusting for pre-existing differences between depressed and non-depressed youth, the causal relationship between depression and delinquency and the association between depression and trajectories of delinquency appears to be largely spurious.