A Preliminary Study for Developing a Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale in the Mental Health Service

Row, Kyung Ran; Suh, Dong Soo

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study was to develop an assessment tool for measurement of children's functioning in the mental health service. We conducted a preliminary study to develop a sensitive and inclusive scale focused on the functional changes of children rather than just focusing on their symptoms or screening.
METHODS
The Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale and the Korean-Child Behavior Checklist (K-CBCL) were both administered to 134 parents of children with emotional or behavioral problems who participated in the Aizone program and also to 186 parents of elementary school children in the Seoul metropolitan area as a control group. SPSS version 12.0 was used for statistical analysis.
RESULTS
Most of the reliability coefficients were over 0.70 except those of the conduct behavior items, which showed relatively high internal consistency. The corrected item-total correlations ranged from .411 to .758, except those of conduct behavior items and special measure items. In a concurrent validity test with K-CBCL, the total behavior problem score of K-CBCL was highly correlated with the total score of the Child and Adolescent Functional Assesment Scale (r=.610). For the construct validity, confirmatory factor analysis was performed for each of four areas, including behavior (at home/school), achievement, peer relationship, and emotion.
CONCLUSION
The results showed that the scale was statistically reliable and valid, except for conduct behavior items. This study was conducted only for parents with elementary children. An adolescents group should be included in future studies.