The assessment of childhood psychopathology: The construction of a new self-report psychiatric rating scale for children

Abstract

The need for a reliable taxonomy and easily applicable quantitative methods is emphasized as important to the development of child psychiatry as a science. Existing rating scales are examined critically and a new self-report psychiatric rating scale for children is proposed. The items comprising this rating scale were adapted from some existing inventories and new items were devised from a clinical-theoretical framework to explore clinically relevant personality dimensions. Factor analysis methods were used to identify twelve dimensions from questionnaire responses of 420 seven to twelve year old normative children. Test-retest correlations of discriminant scores was .70 for the boys and .63 for the girls. Evidence in support of the discriminant validity of this rating scale is also presented. A rating scale such as this is suggested as one approach to the study of childhood psychopathology.