The Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form: age and gender effects and norms.

The team gave the Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form to kids with intellectual or developmental disabilities. They wanted age and gender norms so scores could be compared fairly.

They looked at whether older kids scored differently than younger kids. They also checked if boys and girls got different scores.

Age changed some behavior scores, but gender did not. Now clinicians have tables showing typical scores for each age group.

You can flip to the age column and see if a child’s score is high, low, or average for kids like them.

Giné et al. (2017) also built norms, but for the Catalan SIS-C. Both papers give local comparison data so scores mean the same thing in everyday use.

Dolezal et al. (2010) found that cognitive level did not predict behavior problems in kids with ID. Cameron et al. (1996) adds age norms, showing that age, not IQ, is what you must control for when you judge if a score is typical.

Smit et al. (2019) later wrote new ICD-11 behavior tables for diagnosis. The 1996 Nisonger norms still matter because they give fine-grained, age-based benchmarks for daily treatment choices, while the 2019 tables are for official diagnosis.

If you use the Nisonger CBRF, open the age norms before you write goals. A score that looks high for a six-year-old can be average for a four-year-old, so age matters more than gender when you decide if a behavior needs intervention.