The relative effects of maternal depression, child gender, and child psychiatric status on mothers' ratings of their children were assessed in a study of the validity of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Both maternal depression and gender were found to be significantly associated with mothers' ratings of their children on the CBCL. Nevertheless, mothers' ratings continued to differentiate groups of children with and without psychiatric problems even after the variance accounted for by maternal depression and child gender was removed. These findings support the criterion validity of the CBCL, and point also to the importance of assessing parents as part of the clinical evaluation of children.
The applicability of the reformulated helplessness model of depression to children was assessed with outpatient samples from child psychiatric (N = 29) and pediatric (N = 26) clinics. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to determine the relationship between attributional style and depressive symptoms. In contrast to theoretical prediction, the results indicated that a measure of the attribution of positive events to external, unstable, and specific factors was a more important predictor of depressive symptoms in children than was a measure of the attribution of negative events to internal, stable, and global factors. In the context of similarly inconsistent findings with adults, the results are discussed in terms of the applicability of the helplessness model of depression to children and the need for further revision and refinement of the reformulated helplessness hypothesis to take account of the growing number of studies reporting results inconsistent with its postulates.
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