Assessing effortful control in typical and atypical development: Are questionnaires and neuropsychological measures interchangeable? A latent-variable analysis.
Parent questionnaires and EF tasks measure different parts of self-control—use both before writing goals for kids with ADHD or ASD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave 10- to young learners two kinds of effortful-control tests.
One kind was parent questionnaires. The other kind was computer EF tasks like Stroop and go/no-go.
Kids were either neurotypical, had ADHD, or had ASD. The study used stats to see if both test types measured the same thing.
What they found
Questionnaires and tasks did not load on one latent factor. They tracked different skills.
Group differences also diverged. Questionnaires showed bigger ADHD vs typical gaps. Tasks showed bigger ASD vs typical gaps.
So swapping one for the other would give the wrong picture.
How this fits with other research
Evers et al. (2020) saw the same split in autism interviews. Two parent tools agreed only 75 % and missed opposite symptoms. Like Vicky et al., they warn that one measure is not enough.
Smith et al. (2021) links fine-motor skill to IQ more in ADHD than in typical kids. Their pattern matches Vicky’s task data: performance tests pick up ADHD-related variance that ratings miss.
Najafichaghabouri et al. (2024) shows that even within tasks, kid responding is shaky. Only 2 of the children changed accuracy when the interviewer changed. This supports Vicky’s point: more than one method is needed before you trust the score.
Why it matters
If you test effortful control for behavior-planning, do not rely on a parent form alone. Add a short EF task battery. The two pieces tell different stories, especially for kids with ADHD or ASD. Use both to write sharper goals and to avoid under- or over-estimating self-control skills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVE: Effortful control (EC), the self-regulation component of temperament, is traditionally measured using questionnaires. Through the years, several neuropsychological measures originating from the cognitive psychology and the executive function (EF) literature have been introduced in the domain of temperament research to tap EC. Although this is not particularly surprising, given the conceptual overlap between EC and EF, it remains unclear whether EC questionnaires and neuropsychological EF tasks can really be used interchangeably when measuring EC. The current study addressed two important aspects in evaluating the interchangeability of both types of measures, that is: (a) do they measure the same construct? and (b) do they give the same results when comparing clinical populations? METHOD: Three EC questionnaires, two inhibitory control tasks, and two attentional control tasks were administered in 148 typically developing children, 30 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and 31 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). All children were between 10 and 15 years of age and had a full scale IQ of 80 or higher. RESULTS: Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the questionnaires and EF tasks do not capture the same underlying latent variable(s). Groups could not be differentiated from each other based on their performance on EF tasks, whereas significant group differences were found for all EC-reports. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our findings show more differences than commonalities between the EC questionnaires and EF tasks and, consequently, suggest that both types of measures should not be used interchangeably.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.10.018