The relational structure of psychological symptoms and disorders is of crucial importance to mechanistic and causal research. Methodologically, factor analytic approaches (latent variable modeling) and network analyses are two dominant approaches. Amidst some debate about their relative merits, use of both methods simultaneously in the same data set has rarely been reported in child or adolescent psychopathology. A second issue is that the nosological structure can be enriched by inclusion of transdiagnostic constructs, such as neurocognition (e.g., executive functions and other processes). These cut across traditional diagnostic boundaries and are rarely included even though they can help map the mechanistic architecture of psychopathology. Using a sample enriched for ADHD (n = 498 youth ages 6 to 17 years; M = 10.8 years, SD = 2.3 years, 55% male), both approaches were used in two ways: (a) to model symptom structure and (b) to model seven neurocognitive domains hypothesized as important transdiagnostic features in ADHD and associated disorders. The structure of psychopathology domains was similar across statistical approaches with internalizing, externalizing, and neurocognitive performance clusters. Neurocognition remained a distinct domain according to both methods, showing small to moderate associations with internalizing and externalizing domains in latent variable models and high connectivity in network analyses. Overall, the latent variable and network approaches yielded more convergent than discriminant findings, suggesting that both may be complementary tools for evaluating the utility of transdiagnostic constructs for psychopathology research.

心理症状和障碍的关系结构对于机制和因果研究至关重要。在方法论上，因子分析方法（潜在变量建模）和网络分析是两种主要方法。在关于它们的相对优点的一些争论中，在儿童或青少年精神病理学中很少报道在同一数据集中同时使用这两种方法。第二个问题是疾病分类结构可以通过包含跨诊断结构来丰富，例如神经认知（例如，执行功能和其他过程）。这些跨越了传统的诊断界限，即使它们可以帮助绘制精神病理学的机制架构图，也很少被包括在内。使用富含 ADHD 的样本（n  = 498 名 6 至 17 岁的青年；M  = 10.8 年，标准差 = 2.3 岁，55% 男性），这两种方法都以两种方式使用：（a）模拟症状结构和（b）模拟被假设为 ADHD 和相关疾病的重要跨诊断特征的七个神经认知域。精神病理学领域的结构在具有内化、外化和神经认知性能集群的统计方法中是相似的。根据这两种方法，神经认知仍然是一个独特的领域，在潜在变量模型中显示出与内化和外化领域的小到中度关联以及在网络分析中的高连通性。总体而言，潜在变量和网络方法比判别结果产生更多的收敛性，这表明两者可能是评估跨诊断结构在精神病理学研究中的效用的互补工具。