Brief child assessment battery to assist with treatment planning and program evaluation

Abstract

A brief battery of self-report measures was constructed to discriminate effectively 45 matched clinic versus nonclinic subjects, ages 8 to 15. The battery consisted of measures from six domains, including externalizing problems, child and parent report of internalizing problems, peer relations, school functioning, and family relationships. Data on subjects and their families were provided by various sources, including parents, teachers, and the children. In an effort to facilitate interpretation and use of this information by unsophisticated staff, within domain scores were converted to bivariate risk scores. Results indicated effective classification (82%) of groups using the bivariate risk scores alone. This constituted only a small loss of information when the risk scores replaced t-scores. Implications for the use of the risk scores to facilitate treatment planning and program evaluation are discussed.