The aim was to examine the agreement among parents, teachers, psychologists, and educational diagnosticians in their perceptions of the problem behaviors of emotionally disturbed children. The sample of 194 emotionally disturbed boys and girls included 129 whites and 65 blacks. The use of measures of relationship showed that there was significantly greater consensus among the raters in perceptions of white than of black children; agreement was particularly poor between parents and teachers of black youngsters. The implications of these findings are discussed.The implementation of Public Law 94-142 requires that parents become dynamically involved in their children's educational programs; it also demands that children be assessed by multidisciplinary teams that will arrive at conclusions and program strategies jointly with parents. Of extreme current importance is knowledge regarding the degree to which the parents of handicapped youngsters agree with the judgment of school personnel regarding the nature and degree of their child's problems. Equally important are data showing the degree to which professionals from a variety of disciplines agree among themselves in their assessment of a handicapped child's problems.Numerous studies have produced evidence of similar factors in ratings of problem behaviors of children and adolescents. These factorial similarities are found consistently from study to study and also from rater to rater (Connersand others). However, when factor scores are obtained for groups, wide differences may exist in rating styles, thereby adding much error to analysis. Consequently, comparisons of factor scores between rater groups may obscure agreement on ratings for individual children.Relatively low interrelationships among the factor score ratings assigned an individual child by different raters have been the subject of some controversy. Quay, Sprague, Shulman, and Miller (1966), for example, correlated mothers' and fathers' ratings with teachers, ratings and obtained coefficients ranging from .32 to $41 on two of their factor scores. Becker (1960) obtained similar results, finding only a .34 correlation between factor score ratings of parents and teachers, as did Peterson, et al. (1961), who found parent vs. teacher correlations in the .24 to .41 range for three factors. Moderate
Compared the factor structure of paientd and teachers' ratings of children's behavior problems. Data were analyzed for a heterogeneous group of 194 emotionally disturbed boys and girls aged 3-13 years. Three factors emerged based on parents' ratings, and highly similar factom were obtained from teachers' ratings. The factors clcsely resemble the dimensions isolated in numerous previous studies, such 88 Quay's Conduct Problem, InadequacyImmaturity, and Personality Problem factors. The importance of the findings is discussed, especially pert.aining to the analysis of parents' ratings.Children's behavior problems have been studied fairly extensively during the past 15 years, particularly via the technique of factor analysis. A review of the literature suggests striking consistencies in the factorial structure underlying ratings of problem behaviors in children and adolescents. Three factors appear time and again in studies of normal and disturbed children: (a) a highly aggressive and hostile dimension of behavior that has been given labels such as conduct disorder or unsocialized aggression, (b) an anxious and withdrawn behavioral dimension that has been associated with neuroticism and personality problems, and (c) a dimension of behavior that is characterized by lack of interest in or awareness of the environment, passivity, and laziness, and has typically been called autism, inadequacy-immaturity, low need achievement, or inattentive-passive.The above three factors have been isolated in numerous analyses of teachers' or supervisors' ratings of normal children and adolescents (Miller,
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