Title: Achenbach Child Behavior Check List CBCL AND Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI
1Achenbach Child Behavior Check List
(CBCL)ANDMinnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI)
2Achenbach Child Behavior Check List (CBCL)
3Child Behavior Check List Test Construction
- Test devised to measure problems in childrens
psychological adjustment - Test developers wanted to put together a
reasonably comprehensive list of all the
different sorts of behavior problems that a child
might exhibit - Content-driven (inductive) test construction
approach - Content-driven test developers bet they can
devise a comprehensive set of items, and then
administer their test to a very large pool of
subjects (about 5,000 for the most recent CBCL)
data is then factor analyzed to reveal the
underlying structure
4Child Behavior Check List (cont.)
- From example, note the following
- Large age range (questions for kids 6-18 yrs)
- Parents answer 113 main questions indicating how
often child engages in each of the problem
behaviors - Parents answer a number of preliminary questions
about sports, hobbies, clubs, jobs chores,
close friends, academic performance - Could interpret individual items, but would they
be very reliable?
58 Clinical Syndromes
- Factor analysis revealed eight factors
- Each factor contains items that correlate well
with each other, and less well with items in
other factors - Alphas for these factors range from .78 to .94
- 1. Anxious/depressed
- 2. Withdrawn/depressed
- 3. Somatic Complaints
- 4. Social Problems
- 5. Thought Problems
- 6. Attention Problems
- 7. Rule-Breaking Behavior
- 8. Aggressive Behavior
- Also Other problems
62 Syndromes of Syndromes
- Factor analysis also revealed several factors
correlated better with each other than with the
other factors - Therefore, two super-factors or syndromes of
syndromes are also identified - Alphas for these super-factors are .90 and .94
(for total problems, .97)
- 1. Internalizing Problems
- Anxious/depressed
- Withdrawn/depressed
- Somatic Complaints
- 2. Externalizing Problems
- Rule-breaking Behavior
- Aggressive Behavior
7CBCL Some Issues To Consider
- Issue 1 Possibility to collect reports from
different sources (Parent report form, Teacher
report form, Youth self report form) - May introduce inconvenient inconsistencies
- May help understand the child in different
circumstances better (home versus school) - May aid in diagnostic issues such as AD/HD, which
requires problems in two domains - May help include teachers in assessment process
8CBCL Some Issues To Consider
- Issue 2 Convenient scoring form which allows
easy translation of raw scores to normed scores,
which are much more interpretable - Helps visually depict overall profile
- Allows for quick comparisons to age group E.g.
raw score of 8 on Social Problems for a 15-year
old yields a score at the 98th percentile score
is higher than 98 of his peers compare to raw
score on Aggressive Behavior
9CBCL Some Issues To Consider
- Issue 3 If this is a highly valid test, what
should it correlate with? Likewise, what should
it not correlate with? - Should correlate well with other similar measures
(such as Connors Scales, and Behavior Assessment
System for Children Scales) and different
measures such as actual behavior ratings - Should not correlate well with degree of parent
psychopathology
10CBCL Some Issues To Consider
- Issue 4 The Achenbach CBCL provides a good
example of a test that uses an content-driven/indu
ctive approach. It also provides a good example
of how aggregating over increasing number of
items produces higher reliabilities.
11Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
12Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction
- Most widely used objective test devised to
measure personality and psychopathology - Wanted to develop test that would distinguish
between normal and abnormal/clinical groups - Criterion-driven (external) test construction
approach - Criterion-driven test developers bet that their
criterion groups will differ markedly on their
responses to a wide variety of items a good
theory of why they differ in their responses is
not required for this strategy of test
construction
13Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction
- Criterion-driven Large, diverse pool of items
administered to criterion groups items with
means that are substantially different for the
groups are kept - Developed in 1930s time of growing skepticism
about more construct-driven (deductive tests) - MMPI Criterion groups Initially 800 Psychiatric
inpatients of University of Minnesota Hospital
but numbers reduced to find homogeneous groupings
(8 groups of 50 patients)
14Final 8 Criterion Groups
- 1. Hypochondriac
- 2. Depressed
- 3. Hysteric
- 4. Psychopathic deviate
- 5. Paranoid
- 6. Psychasthenic
- 7. Schizophrenic
- 8. Hypomaniac
- Body fears and illness
- Depressed individuals
- Physical problem with no cause
- Criminal, antisocial problems
- Poor reality testing, delusions
- Doubts and unreasonable fears
- Dramatic psychotic symptoms
- Irritability and hyperactivity
15Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction (cont.)
- MMPI Control groups 700 people, primarily
relatives and visitors of patients, excluding
mental patients. Control group considered
problematic by many because relatives of
inpatients is likely not a representative sample
of controls. - Item pool over 1000 true-false items assembled,
566 items selected (MMPI-II has 567 items)
16Two Further Clinical Scales
- Added later, using somewhat sloppy criterial
procedures - Masculinity-femininity
- Social-introversion
- Most of these 10 clinical scales have many
subtle items (e.g., I drink an unusually large
amount of water everyday discriminates hysteria
criterion group from normals)
17Three Validity Scales
- Lie Scale Naïve attempts to fake good
- F Scale Attempt to fake bad
- K Scale Defensiveness (empirically constructed)
- Attempts to locate items that distinguished
normal from abnormal groups when both produced a
normal test pattern
18Interpretation and MMPI-II
- Often people obtain scores with elevations on
several subscales rather than just one - Led to shift in use, interpretation, and study of
the MMPI and MMPI-2 - Clinical scales re-named with numbers 1,2,9 and
0 - Highest 1 or 2 elevations typically interpreted
(e.g., two point code of 1-3) - Higher elevations correspond with severity
- MMPI-II released in 1989 contains expanded
norms, and updates and improvements to items - Items fixed that were out of date, awkward,
sexist, problematic - Administered to 2900 subjects from 7 geographic
regions in U.S. to improve control group problems