A child who may have “conduct disorder issues” can be identified by The Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist. Created by Thomas Achenbach and his fellow colleagues at the University of Vermont. This check list can prove or disprove if a child fits the behavior list by doing an assessment of twenty different areas of the child’s competence and performance levels and rating their behavior. This test is very widely used across the globe and translated into 75 different languages. This testing is accurate in helping evaluate the diagnosis of the child’s mental health.
Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist
Unlike the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist, many standard mental health evaluations want to put a child into one classification or another and not understand that each child will react differently and individually to certain circumstances. They also tend to try and “explain a way” a child’s behavior by out side influences that have been done to the child such as- abusive parents, traumatic experiences or other things that basically is saying the child has learned behaviors to act a certain way and they leave out true mental health illnesses that could be involved.
Yes- these are reasons children act out but there are also chemical imbalances and things like neurological disorders such as: SID (Sensory Integration Disorder) that could also be the culprit. These disorders-mental illnesses take the behaviors out of a “guilty parties’ hand” way of thinking and puts the behaviors into a “true mental condition” area where no one made the behaviors happen, it is just the way the child was developed.
Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist consists of waves of questions concerning your child’s every day behavior. It also includes questions on competence, emotional problems, actions, reactions and many other issues concerning the child. Someone very close to the child such as a parent, teacher or caregiver will answer the questions so that the answers are as correct as humanly possible. There are two versions of this test, a pre-school version which contains 100 questions and a school age version which contains 120 questions. A rating system for example: 0- Not true, 1- Somewhat and so on. Other questions are grouped together such as Anger questions, aggressive behaviors, depressions symptoms ect. In the end a total score is added up for comparison to a wide age range and scores by gender and by study site.
With the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist a teacher can rate a group of children together over a period of time during different school activities. Making this program very flexible. Yet, because of the specific questions teachers, parents or caregivers are limited on the certain behaviors or traits they can score upon. This will lead to categorizing children on the check list when in all actuality they have behaviors that are not on the check list and need further evaluations. One major disadvantage is that all the answers on the check list go by the person who is rating it own interpretation. A parent who spends a lot of time with a child may see a child’s behavior one way and a teacher may see it another way.
Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist – Conclusion
In all the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist is a good evaluation for a child but when there are further behaviors not on the check list a person may need to do further tests. The Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist rates well with teachers and parents as being a very helpful tool.
