The Child Behaviour Checklist and the Rutter Parental Questionnaire: a comparison between two screening instruments

In order to carry out an epidemiological survey of child psychiatric disorders in a community sample, the Child Behaviour Checklist was chosen as a parental questionnaire for screening in the first stage of the study. A French version of this instrument was developed and a pilot study of the scale was completed on a clinical sample (N = 127). As a criterion to gauge its validity, the Rutter scale was used as a concurrent measure. The correlation coefficient between the total scores of the two scales is 0.79, and ranges between 0.22 and 0.96 for individual items. A linear regression analysis, using the total score of the Rutter scale as an independent variable, predicts a value of 41 as the optimal cut-off to be used for the Child Behaviour Checklist. Comparative properties (reliability and time of completion) of the two scales are presented and discussed.