Rating problem behaviors in outpatients with mental retardation: use of the Aberrant Behavior Checklist.
The ABC keeps its five subscales for ID outpatients, yet factor patterns shift in autism, so pick the version that matches your population.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked parents and teachers to fill out the Aberrant Behavior Checklist for outpatients with intellectual disability.
They ran numbers to see if the five subscales held up and if different raters agreed.
What they found
The five-factor structure stayed intact.
Reliability was good to excellent for both parents and teachers.
How this fits with other research
Gerhardt et al. (1991) looked at the same checklist in autistic kids the same year and found only three factors.
The papers seem to clash, but the kids were different: outpatients with ID here, school-age kids with autism there.
McCarron et al. (2002) later repeated the factor work in autism and again found a new five-factor map, not the original one.
Lan et al. (2025) later showed the ABC still works as a screen for ASD in Chinese clinics, stretching its reach beyond ID.
Why it matters
You can trust the ABC parent and teacher forms for clients with ID in clinic settings.
If you use it with autistic clients, expect the subscales to shake out differently; watch for updates rather than forcing the old five.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Parent and teacher ratings of behavior problems of an outpatient sample of 110 children, adolescents, and young adults with IQs ranging from severe mental retardation to borderline were obtained using a modified version of the Aberrant Behavior Checklist (ABC). Using factor analytic techniques, the five-factor structure of the parent data corresponded extremely well with the five factors originally obtained from staff ratings of mentally retarded inpatients (i.e., Irritability, Withdrawal, Hyperactivity, Stereotypies, and Inappropriate Speech). Factor content was virtually identical between the parent and original ABC data with differences involving only one or two items per scale. The teacher data also revealed a factor structure that corresponded to the same five factors as the parent and original data. Although the teacher and parent factors showed a high degree of similarity, the teacher data suggested that the Stereotypies and Inappropriate Speech factors of the parent and original analyses were not the same constructs for teacher respondents. Age was related to the withdrawal factor for parent data; level of intellectual functioning was the only subject characteristic related to factor scale scores in both parent and teacher data. Test-retest reliabilities were adequate to excellent for all factors for both parent and teacher data. Parent-teacher cross-informant reliabilities were adequate for at least four of the factors. The results of the report indicate that the ABC is a useful, reliable instrument for assessing maladaptive behaviors in young, developmentally disabled outpatients.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1991 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(91)90037-s