Spitz, Andrea http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6637-4927
Winkler Metzke, Christa
Steinhausen, Hans-Christoph
Article History
Accepted: 4 November 2020
First Online: 10 November 2020
Compliance with Ethical Standards
:
: AS and CW report no conflict of interest. HCS worked as a speaker for Medice and has received book royalties from Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Hogrefe, Huber, Klett, and Kohlhammer publishers.
: At the time of the first data collection for this study in 1994 and the first publication based on the Zurich Epidemiological Study of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (ZESCAP) in 1998 and its later follow-up study called the Zurich Adolescent Psychology and Psychopathology Study (ZAPPS), no ethical committee existed at the study centre (based at the University of Zurich) or in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, to give approval. The Principal Investigator of the original study (HCS.) assures that the involvement of the local school authorities (a governmental institution of the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland) and the informed consent of the parents of all participating pupils should be regarded as an equivalent to the approval of an ethical committee, together with the past financial support of the project from the federal Swiss Science Foundation over several years. Furthermore, all authors declare that the present and earlier studies were conducted in compliance with the APA Ethical Principles. Several earlier articles based on ZESCAP data have been published by various international journals in the past. The authors also declare that no retrospective ethical approval has been sought or requested in the past and that such a procedure could not be considered feasible or realistic given the circumstances.