In this study risk variables were dichotomized to produce the cumulative score. Although this is a common approach in previous studies, dichotomizing variables in this way may lead to oversimplifying the dataset, resulting in information loss (Pollard,Hawkins,& Arthur 1999). Furthermore,cumulative risk scores that use the lowest25% as a cut-off to signify risk are limited to the sample from which the data were collected and may not reflect the entire population, limiting generalizability (Raviv et al., 2010). Nonetheless, in response to some of these criticisms, Farrington and Loeber (2000) contend that splitting data by means of dichotomization has a minimal effect on the data and should not affect the conclusions drawn.