The Developmental Behavior Checklist: the development and validation of an instrument to assess behavioral and emotional disturbance in children and adolescents with mental retardation.
The DBC is a quick, solid way for carers to flag emotional and behavioral problems in kids with intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a new carer checklist called the Developmental Behavior Checklist (DBC).
Parents or staff answer 96 questions about worry, self-harm, tantrums, and odd habits.
Kids and teens had intellectual disability. The study checked if the form gives steady scores and flags real trouble.
What they found
The DBC stayed steady when different people scored the same child.
It also matched well with other known behavior tools.
High scores clearly separated kids who already saw a psychiatrist from those who did not.
How this fits with other research
Estes et al. (2011) later stretched the DBC idea into the Pain Behaviour Checklist for kids with profound disabilities. They kept the same parent-mark format but hunted for pain, not mental-health signs.
Chou et al. (2007) built DisDAT, another carer form, yet aimed at general distress cues they could individualise. The DBC gives fixed norms; DisDAT gives personal profiles.
Saunders et al. (1988) tested the Autism Behavior Checklist and saw mixed accuracy. The DBC improved on that by showing cleaner yes-or-no cut-offs for emotional disturbance in ID.
Why it matters
You now have a free, normed checklist that reliably spots mood and behavior problems in clients who cannot self-report. Give it to parents at intake, re-check every six months, and use high scores to justify a referral or start a behavior plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Describes the development and validation of the Developmental Behavior Checklist (DBC), a standardized instrument completed by lay informants to assess behavioral and emotional disturbance in children and adolescents with mental retardation (MR). Items describing common behavioral and emotional problems in this population were generated by extracting descriptions from 664 case files of children and adolescents with behavior disorders seen at a specialist developmental assessment service over 12 years. These items were reduced to a set of 96 items administered to a sample of 1,093 children and adolescents with mental retardation and then submitted to a principal components analysis. Six interpretable and partly validated subscales were obtained which explained 36% of the total variance and had satisfactory internal consistency. Interrater and test-retest agreement were satisfactory for both total scale score and for scores on each of the subscales. Good evidence of concurrent validity was provided by substantial positive correlations between total scores on the DBC completed by lay informants and the ratings of experienced psychiatrists based upon interviews and scores on two standardized instruments that must be completed by health professionals. The discriminative validity of the total score as assessed by area under the ROC curve was excellent (92%). Standardized norms for the DBC are derived from an epidemiological study of behavior problems in children and adolescents with mental retardation undertaken in two Australian States. Norms are available for the mild, moderate, severe, and profound MR groups and for the MR population as a whole.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1995 · doi:10.1007/BF02178498