ABSTRACT
This chapter examines internal consistency reliability and parent-teacher agreement on both the English and Spanish versions of the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) among ethnically and linguistically diverse children and families living in poverty. The DECA appears to be a reliable and potentially useful instrument for examining social-emotional protective factors and behavioral concerns within a large sample of ethnically and linguistically diverse preschoolers living in an urban, impoverished environment. One of the features of the DECA that distinguishes it from other available measures of social skills and behavior in early childhood is that it was designed with a focus on children's strengths and resilience, whereas most other measures emphasize child problems and pathology. Assessment in early childhood has a necessarily different focus, the acquisition of information about a child's development and environment in order to understand that child's strengths and weaknesses and facilitate the creation of curricula and interventions to meet the child's needs.
