Child Development Project (CDP)

The CDP is an ongoing, longitudinal project designed to understand how conduct problems develop from age five to adulthood.


The study began in 1987 with 585 participants from Bloomington, Indiana, Nashville and Knoxville Tennessee. Today, our participants can be found living all over the United States and abroad.


image exampleOver the years we have used a variety of different methods of data collection from interviews, home observations, and laboratory assessments. Information has been gathered with the generous help of our participants, their parents, friends, teachers, and romantic partners. As we continue to learn about our participants as adults, we are have begun data collection with their children. As more of our participants become parents, we will be able to ask questions about the continuity of a variety of factors with the next generation.

Selected Publications

A complete list of publications from the CDP can be found here.


Dick, D.M., Latendresse, S.J., Lansford, J.E., Buddle, J.P., Goate, A., Dodge, K.A., Pettit, G.S., & Bates, J.E. (under review). A role of GABRA2 in trajectories of externalizing behavior across development and evidence of moderation by parental monitoring. Archives of General Psychiatry.

Last updated August, 2009 | Design modified from original by Andreas Viklund.