Stability of the sociodemographic variance of the Type A behavior pattern in Finnish adolescents and young adults.

Stability of the sociodemographic variance of the Type A behavior pattern found in a previous study was studied 3 years later in the same subjects, 1,333 adolescents and young adults. The Type A behavior questionnaire for the Finnish Multicenter Study and the Hunter-Wolf A-B Rating Scale were used to measure Type A behavior. The previous finding, that the results are highly dependent on the method used, was confirmed, and the stability of the findings assessed by the same method was high. The results confirm the previous suggestion that Type A behavior is not indisputably a pattern characterizing male, urban, and middle-to-upper economic and educational subgroups; the interactions among different sociodemographic variables are more complex.