Clinical groupings of problem children based on symptons and behavior

Use of the Child Behavior Checklist in an Israeli adolescent psychiatric unit

This article deals with the Hebrew version of an instrument for the diagnosis of psychopathology in young adolescents: the Child Behavior Checklist and the associated Child Behavior Profile developed by Achenbach (1978). We report on a study of the reliability and validity of the checklist and its suitability for use with severely disturbed adolescents in Israel. Parents of 130 adolescents, 89 healthy and 41 sick, participated in the research. The scales were found to be valid in that two-thirds of the items were correctly assigned by clinicians in Israel to their respective scales; it is internally consistent as measured by the Cronbach coefficient; and it is reliable in distinguishing between patient and control groups. Scores for control adolescents in Israel were found to be very similar to norms in the United States, the Netherlands and Chile. This finding may have important implications for cross-cultural research.

Aggressive conduct disorder of children

We studied 58 children with aggressive conduct disorder who had been admitted to a psychiatric ward and 33 with other disorders, excluding autism and organic syndromes, who were also inpatients. Nurses's observations of the children's behavior on the ward sharply separated the two groups and confirmed the parents' and teachers' descriptions of the conduct disorder children's behavior at home and in school. Items in the clinical history also separated the two groups; for example, conduct disorder began at a much earlier age than the other disorders. Our evidence gives further support to the validity of aggressive conduct disorder as a psychiatric syndrome.