ASEBA forms are completed by many kinds of informants in many settings throughout the world. The CBCL is designed to be completed by people who serve as surrogate parents in institutional settings, as well as by biological, adoptive, and foster parents. To test the factor structure of group care workers’ CBCL ratings, a team of Dutch researchers (Abrecht et al., 2001) performed confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of CBCL scores for 846 4-18-year-olds residing in diverse psychiatric and child welfare treatment facilities in the Netherlands.
Many of the children had mental or physical disabilities, as well as behavioral and emotional problems. CFA supported the eight cross-informant syndromes scored from the CBCL, as well as the broad Internalizing and Externalizing groupings of syndromes. Comparisons with another Dutch CFA and an American CFA showed comparable levels of support for the eight syndromes. Although not all items or syndromes received equally strong support, the authors concluded that, despite differences in culture, language, treatment setting, and the different roles of group care workers versus parents, “The interchangeability of the group care worker scales and their parent-based counterparts supports what these professionals have been doing for years.”
Reference: Albrecht, G., Veerman, J.W., Damen, H., & Kroes, G. (2001). The Child Behavior Checklist for group care workers: A study regarding the factor structure. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 29, 83-89.