Assessment Scales in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry PDF

Preface

The assessment and diagnosis of child and adolescent psychopathology has been the main focus of our research over the last twenty years. When the publisher approached us to write a book containing a comprehensive collection of rating scales for assessing psychopathology in children and adolescents, we did not hesitate to do so, because such an enterprise fitted nicely into our own wish to have access to a reference source on existing rating scales for our own and our colleagues' research and clinical practice.

The complexity of factors involved in the assessment and diagnosis of child and adolescent psychopathology makes this an especially intriguing field. The need for multiple informants (e.g. parents, teachers, and the children themselves), the role of age and developmental change, and the quantitative rather than qualitative nature of child psychopathology are major factors that need to be taken into account when dealing with the measurement of child and adolescent emotional and behavioral problems. Since the recognition that assessment procedures need to be standardized, reliable and valid, and since the introduction of instruments that fitted these criteria, clinical work and research have benefited greatly from reproducible and quantifiable information that was obtained with these procedures.

There are different approaches to the assessment of child psychopathology, including clinical interviews, psychological tests, and rating scales. This book is on rating scales. Rating scales have the advantage that they can be used in a variety of settings in a cost-effective way. Because rating scales can be easily applied to large numbers of subjects, often rating scales have norms that can be used to compare an individual child to same-aged peers. We have attempted to list the majority of rating scales that have been published. The only criterion for inclusion was the availability of enough psychometric properties of a scale to enable the reader to make a judgment. We have approached authors and/or publishers to provide us with the most up to date versions and documentation of the scales. For each scale we have asked permission to reproduce the scale, either in full form, or as sample items. We have attempted to give information about each scale as accurately as possible in an objective and structured way. We had to rely either on commercially available materials (such as manuals) or on published reports in peer-reviewed journals. We are grateful to many authors and publishers who were supportive and helped us by providing us with materials and suggestions.

We have not attempted to give recommendations on the use of scales, since different scales may be appropriate for different purposes. In the introduction we have given a number of guidelines the reader might find useful for choosing a certain scale. We recommend that the original publication on scales is consulted before a scale can be used.

Most rating scales were designed in the English language, and for the majority of scales norms are based on US or UK populations. In our rapidly changing society in which many children from various cultural backgrounds live together in one geographical area and with the increasing use of rating scales in countries where the native language in non-English, it is helpful to know if a rating scale is available in different languages and whether local norms are available. For some scales this information is available, but for the majority of scales this is not the case. Because systematic information on translations and local norms was lacking for the majority of scales, we have omitted this information in this edition. Hopefully it will be possible to include this important information in a next edition.

We wish to thank the publisher for taking the initiative to publish this book and Abigail Griffin, Kelly Cornish and Peter Stevenson for supporting us to accomplish this in due time.