ABSTRACT
Clinical and self-esteem items were developed separately. The ACC’s clinical content was derived systematically over several years, using a combination of deductive and inductive strategies. The aim was to identify all clinically significant problems experienced by children in alternate care that are not adequately measured by the CBCL. Deductive, or content-based strategy, is ‘based on a priori or theoretical conceptions of the behavioral or personality domain that the instrument is being designed to measure’ (Aiken, 1996). In applying a deductive strategy, items are designed to measure pre-determined constructs. An example would be the development of a diagnostic screening interview. By contrast, inductive (or empirical) strategy is applied without presumption of underlying constructs. Instead, clinical content is identified at the level of individual behaviours or symptoms, and syndromes are identified from statistical analysis of large item sets (Aiken, 1996; Burisch, 1984). Research on the mental health of maltreated children has been limited, and little is known about the phenomenology of problems manifested by children in care. Hence, a purely deductive approach would fail to locate some relevant problems. Conversely, it was thought that content derived inductively could be biased because of the relatively small scale of the project (e.g. via selection bias, responder bias or location bias). Hence, a combination of deductive and inductive strategies was employed to maximise the validity and comprehensiveness of the selected content. These strategies are set out below.
