Defining Child Noncompliance: An Examination of Temporal Parameters

This study examined compliance parameters for 53 clinic-referred and nonreferred children, ages 2 to 10 years. Although there were significant differences between the referred and nonreferred samples for percentage compliance, there were no significant differences between the referred and nonreferred samples in terms of initiation or completion latencies. The average initiation latency was 5.92 s, whereas 98% of the sample initiated compliance within 14 s. Younger children did take longer to complete tasks. Results suggest that the use of short latencies in defining noncompliance may represent overly conservative criteria.