Using Child Behavior Checklist for Assessing and Detecting Peschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) usually accompanied emotional and behavioral problems. Children with emotional and behavioral problems could resulte in more impartments on their social and communication distress, thus make stress on their caregiver.

Objectives: Child Behavior Check List 1.5-5 (CBCL/1.5-5) is a tool for evaluating emotional and behavioral problems of preschool children. Precious researches used CBCL/1.5-5 to screen ASDs children. However, there is no research in Taiwan. In this study, the CBCL/1.5-5 was used to assess and detect peschool children with ASDs.

Methods: 249 children aged less than 48 months old, including 99 children with ASDs, 114 children with developed delay (DD), and 36 children with typical development. The CBCL/1.5-5 was completed by the caregivers for measuring emotional and behavioral problems of all children.

Results: These three groups showed significantly different on the internalizing problems, total problems, withdrawn, attention problems, and pervasive developmental problems subscales. All of withdrawn, pervasive developmental problem and internalizing problems are better index for distihduishing children with ASDs from children with DD. Using signal detection procedure, T-score of 66 on the withdrawn subscale as the cut-off to distinguish children with ASDs from those with DD, the sensitivity and specificity were 72% and 70%, respectively; the pervasive developmental problems subscale use T-score of 70 as the cut-off to distinguish children with ASDs from those with DD, the sensitivity and specificity were 71% and 63%, respectively; the Internalizing problems scale use T-score of 63 as the cut-off to distinguish children with ASDs from those with DD, the sensitivity and specificity were 71% and 63%, respectively. The results revealed that using the withdrawn and pervasive developmental problems subscale as a screening index for fdeteding children with ASDs, it showed accepted validity.

Conclusions: Used the CBCL/1.5-5 as a screening tool for children with ASDs, the withdrawn and pervasive developmental problem subscale have moderate validity, suggest the two subscales can be screening tool in the clinical setting.