The Child Behavior Profile: An Empirically Based System for Assessing Children’s Behavioral Problems and Competencies

One of the greatest obstacles to research on epidemiology, etiology, prognosis, and treatment, as well as to clinical communication, is the lack of a standardized, reliable, and well-validated system for measuring children1 s behavior disorders. The situation in adult psy chopatho logy, though far from ideal, is somewhat better in several respects. First, a much longer history of taxonomie efforts has produced general acceptance of broad diagnostic categories such as senile psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, neurosis, and personality disorders. The reliability and correlates of these categories leave much to be desired, but they do provide more of an organizing structure for theory, research, and clinical communication than exists for childhood disorders. Another way in which the situation is somewhat better with respect to adult disorders is that more precise research criteria have been formulated for differential diagnosis, especially for research on schizophrenia and depression. Furthermore, most adults who come to professional attention do so at least partly on their own initiative and actively contribute to the diagnostic process. Children, by contrast, have little conception of mental health problems or services, they rarely take the initiative in reporting their problems, and they do not easily accept the role of patient imposed by our mental health system. As a consequence, the as-