However, most studies on health behavioural clustering have focused on a relatively small range of health behaviours and fail to examine the clustering of a wide range of risk behaviours such as delinquency, truancy and incurring debts [ 15, 17].
However, knowledge about relationships between depressive symptoms and other clusters of behaviours including delinquency, truancy and incurring debts is scarce.
A high percentage of adolescents and young adults suffer from depressive symptoms and display many risk behaviours such as substance use, delinquency, truancy and making purchases they can not afford, which are acquired during adolescence [ 1].
A review of the effects of early parent training programs aimed at preventing antisocial behaviour and delinquency, shows that parent training is an effective intervention strategy in reducing child disruptive behaviour, with a mean effect size of 0.35.
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) is an intensive, short, family- and community-based treatment for serious antisocial behaviour and delinquency in youth.
The environment in which the boys in our study reside, i.e. low neighbourhood SES, household arrests, financial problems, has been related to both externalizing behaviour like delinquency [ 17, 67, 68] and internalizing problems like depression and anxiety [ 69- 72].
However, little is known about the prevalence of risk behaviours among students in vocational education, especially delinquency, truancy and incurring debts.
The other cluster, problem behaviours, comprised the risk behaviours incurring debts, truancy and delinquency.
Although research suggests that demographics can be used to identify adolescents displaying single risk behaviours or experiencing depressive symptoms, research on whether demographics can be used to identify adolescents and young adults at risk of multiple, clustered risk behaviours, especially clusters including delinquency, truancy and debts, is rare [ 26, 27].
