Assessing Child Compliance-Noncompliance

This article presents normative data on boys' noncompliance and illustrates an easily adaptable technique for assessing that noncompliance. Mothers and sons were videotaped in a structured task situation. The mothers elicited their sons' noncompIiance by interrupting their building a Tinkertoy model with fourteen separate requests. The sons' average latency of initiation (19.6 seconds) and completion (30.01 seconds) were greater than the arbitrary times usually chosen as cutoff points between compliance and noncompliance and the latencies increased from the first seven to the latter seven tasks. The article discusses the implications of this normative data on the clinical assessment of noncompliance.