Using behavioral questionnaires to identify adaptive deficits in elementary school children

Abstract

Adaptive skills are the practical skills used for negotiating one's physical and social environment, including communication skills, daily living skills, and social skills. Adaptive skills are commonly assessed only in children suspected of mental retardation or developmental delay. In this article, it is demonstrated that many other types of children referred for psychometric evaluation, including children with emotional disturbance and/or learning disabilities, also have deficits in adaptive behavior, and that commonly used behavioral scales can predict these deficits. In this investigation, responses to two widely used parent-completed behavioral questionnaires, the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the revised Personality Inventory for Children (PIC-R), were obtained from a sample of 88 boys 6–11 years old. Scales from the CBCL and the PIC-R were used to predict the three domain scales and the Adaptive Behavior Composite from the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. These results highlight relations between dimensions of adaptive behavior and CBCL and PIC-R scales and suggest that behavioral questionnaires can be used to efficiently identify persons who demonstrate deficits based upon more in-depth adaptive behavior assessment.