Assessment of preschool psychopathology in Serbia.
Serbian CBCL/1.5-5 and C-TRF work fine—use them with the usual parent-teacher gap in mind.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers gave Serbian parents and teachers the CBCL/1.5-5 and C-TRF forms. They wanted to see if the Serbian words measured the same problems as the English original.
They checked internal consistency and looked for the usual boy-girl gaps seen in other countries.
What they found
The forms held together. Cronbach’s alphas were good, just like in the U.S. norm sample.
Parents again marked more externalizing problems than teachers. About 13% of kids landed in the clinical range on Total Problems.
How this fits with other research
Glumbić et al. (2012) did the same kind of job for the Serbian CCC-2. Both papers show you can trust translated preschool checklists once you run the stats.
Lee et al. (2023) tried to confirm the ToMI-2 factor structure and failed. The Serbian CBCL passed its factor test, giving a rare win for the original subscales.
Ke et al. (2020) warn that Chinese kids score differently on the Movement ABC-2. Here, Serbian kids showed the same gender pattern seen in Western CBCL norms, so no local re-norming was needed for that piece.
Why it matters
If you screen Serbian preschoolers, you can now use the CBCL/1.5-5 and C-TRF straight out of the box. Expect parents to rate more acting-out than teachers, and keep the 13% clinical-base rate in mind when you explain results to families. No extra fieldwork required.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The utility of the Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 1.5-5 (CBCL/1.5-5) and the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form (C-TRF) to the Serbian children is largely unknown and has not been studied. An aim of this study was to examine rates and distribution of emotional and behavioral problems among 4 to 6-year-old children in the Serbia. Country differences between our Serbian sample and the original U.S. sample, gender differences, and cross-informant agreement between teachers and parents were also to be examined. The CBCL/1.5-5 and the C-TRF was completed by parents and teachers respectively on 512 preschoolers in the city of Novi Sad, Serbia. Internal consistency of the scales was analyzed using Cronbach alpha (α). The comparison of behavioral/emotional syndromes raw scores was performed by t test. CBCL/1.5-5 prevalence rate of the Total Problems score in the clinical range was 13.4%, while the C-TRF prevalence rate for girls was 9.8% and for boys 8.8%. Our findings revealed that parent reported more problems than teachers on almost all scales across gender with the mean cross-informant correlation of 0.24. This study documents gender differences, with boys scoring significantly higher than girls on all externalizing related problem scales on both questionnaires, but with no gender differences on internalizing problems on either questionnaire. Results support the applicability of the Serbian version of the CBCL/1.5-5 and C-TRF and can be recommended for use in clinical and research settings.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.11.027