Use of the Child Behavior Checklist as a Screening Instrument for Epidemiological Research in Child Psychiatry: Results of a Pilot Study

Personality traits among ADHD adults: implications of late-onset and subthreshold diagnoses

“…Many studies have found an excellent correspondence between quantitative measures of ADHD (e.g. scales derived from the Child Behavior Checklist, the Conners Scales and the ADHD Rating Scale IV) and the categorical diagnosis (Edelbrock, 1986;Bird et al 1987;Biederman et al 1993Biederman et al , 1996Chen et al 1994;Boyle et al 1997;Hudziak, 1997). These studies suggest that children with ADHD are at one extreme of a quantitative dimension and that, on this quantitative dimension, there is no obvious bimodality that separates children with ADHD from other children.…”

Can Teachers’ Behavior Ratings Be Used to Screen Early Adolescent Boys for Psychiatric Diagnoses?

“…It is noteworthy that while DSM-III-R has shown a lower false-positive rate than the former DSM-III version for some diagnostic categories , only the study by Jensen et al [1993], to our knowledge, examined the concordance between DSM-III-R diagnoses and dimensional evaluations. Their results, however, yielded a similar screening effi cacy for the CBCL parent's report (CBCL-P) matched with DSM-III-R caseness which is based on the DISC parent/child combined report (sensitivity/specifi city = 0.63/0.73), compared with the results in the study by Bird et al [1987] with DSM-III diagnoses (sensitivity/specifi city of the CBCL-P against the DISC combined report = 0.67/0.74). To our knowledge, no one has used teacher's ratings of the child's behavior as a screening instrument for specifi c categories of DSM-III-R assessed through structured interviews.…”

“…In comparison, our results with teacher ratings showed a sensitivity and specifi city ranging between 0.47 and 0.73 and between 0.64 and 0.81, respectively, across diagnoses for DISC-P ( table 6 ). Using CBCL-P and the combined parent/child DISC report, Bird et al [1987] found a sensitivity of 0.67 and a specifi city of 0.74 in screening for DSM-III caseness. Our results with the S-SBQ indicate a sensitivity of 0.58 and a specifi city of 0.79 for DSM-III-R caseness.…”

“…The instrument was developed for epidemiological surveys, and can be used with children aged 6-18 years [Edelbrock and Costello, 1988b]. Good psychometric properties for the DISC have been reported in a number of studies [Bird et al, 1987;Costello et al, 1984Costello et al, , 1985Edelbrock et al, 1985;Edelbrock and Costello, 1988a;. A revised version of the instrument assessed more recently has also been shown to have good validity and reliability Schwab-Stone et al, 1993;Shaffer et al, 1993].…”

“…First, these interviews can be conducted by lay interviewers to assess psychopathology across a broad spectrum of disorders [Angold, 1988], therefore reducing the cost of psychiatric evaluation. These instruments have been used in a number of epidemiological studies [Bird et al, 1987; and are likely to be used as a second step of evaluation in a large-scale attempt to identify cases for research or intervention purposes. Thus, the use of a structured interview to provide diagnoses in the present study allowed to examine the concordance between the instruments likely to be used in a large community setting.…”