A "common-language" version of the California Child Q-Set for personality assessment.

Abstract

J. Block and J. H. Block's (1980) California Child Q-Set (CCQ), a unique instrument used by professional observers to assess children's personalities, has contributed important information about the nature of personality development. The authorsof this article introduce language-simplifying modifications to the items in the original CCQ for this assessment procedure to be used with a wide range of nonprofessional observers (e.g., parents with little formal education). Reliability and validity assessments show that the common-language version of the CCQ can be used with lay persons to yield reliable, valid, and valuable information about the links between personality functioning and problems in adaptive functioning in diverse populations. Responding to a need for a flexible but clinically rich assessment tool that can be used in diverse populations and with multiple informants and observers, we developed a common language Q-sort, a modification and adaptation of J. Block and J. H. Block's (1969, 1980) observer-based instrument for describing the personality styles of children. The purpose of this article is to introduce the modified version of the California Child Q-set (CCQ) to researchers and clinicians who may then choose to use it in their own research programs when lay persons must provide the observations desired. Although there are a number of instruments for the assessment of children's social and emotional adjustment (e.g., Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1983; Quay & Peterson, 1983), these are primarily concerned with behavior problems and dimensions