Childhood hyperkinesis: A return to the source.

Abstract

A (actor analysis was performed on measures of the most widely agreed upon primary or core symptoms of hyperkinesis in a group of 94 boys seen at a child psychiatry clinic between 1967 and 1972. The three resulting stable factors accounted for 64% of the variance, and each was defined mainly by variables from a particular source of information. Sources included psychiatrists, chart raters, teachers, and parents. Inspection and a reanalysis of other multivariale studies of minimal brain dysfunction/hyperkinesis (MBD/HK) indicated that source-related rather than symptom-related factors typically result. It was suggested that the situational specificity of behaviors in MBD/HK children may contribute to the relative unfruitfulness of such studies. Suggestions for further multivariate research on this problem were made.Hyperkinesis is a childhood behavior disorder which has generated substantial interest in recent years, partially because of its prevalence. An estimated 4%~10% of all school-age children, mostly boys, are affected, and approximately 50% of all childhood behavior disorder referrals are for hyperactivity (Chess

The validity of vigilance tasks in differential diagnosis of children referred for attention and learning problems

“…Since attention and activity problems are often situationspecific, the differences in situations may also contribute to the independence of laboratory and rating measures of attention. Situational effects may also account for the results of the factor analysis: As in other studies deriving information on child behavior from numerous sources (Langhorne, Loney, Paternite, & Bechtoldt, 1976), the analysis revealed strong source effects.…”

A Multitrait?Multisource Confirmatory Factor Analytic Approach to the Construct Validity of ADHD and ODD Rating Scales with Malaysian Children

“…c Adapted from Burns et al (2003, How does one interpret these results? First, source effects are strong in parent and teacher ADHD-IN, ADHD-HI and ODD measures, especially the parent ADHD-HI and ODD and teacher ADHD-IN measures where nearly all the variance is source variance (see Langhorne, Loney, Paternite, & Bechtoldt, 1976, for an early study on the ubiquitous nature of source effects in ADHD measures). The large amount of source variance could mean that the measures contain a large amount of bias (i.e., poor measures of the constructs).…”

A Practical Measure of Impairment: Psychometric Properties of the Impairment Rating Scale in Samples of Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Two School-Based Samples

“…In addition, it has been well established that measures that share a method or rater will share a large amount of variance (e.g., Campbell & Fiske, 1959;Gomez, Burns, Walsh, & Alves de Moura, 2003;Langhorne, Loney, Paternite, & Bechtoldt, 1976;Meyer et al, 2001). This shared variance results in high correspondence between measures that employ the same sources or methods (i.e., two paper-and-pencil rating scales completed by the same teacher or parent).…”