Because
mental-health professionals are not needed to administer most
ASEBA forms, these forms are used for epidemiological surveys,
clinical assessment, outcome evaluations, and research in
many cultures. There are translations in over 85 languages
and thousands of published reports of ASEBA use in over 80
cultures.
In addition
to the many publications reporting use of ASEBA forms within
particular cultures, numerous multicultural comparisons
of ASEBA findings have been published. The first such comparisons
were made between epidemiological samples of randomly selected
Dutch and U.S. children who were rated on the CBCL and TRF.
The Dutch data were obtained by Dr. Frank Verhulst, who
is Professor and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
at Erasmus University and Sophia Children’s Hospital
in Rotterdam and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The
comparisons showed that Dutch children’s problem scale
scores were nearly identical to American children's scores
on both the CBCL and TRF (Achenbach, Verhulst, Baron, &
Akkerhuis, 1987; Achenbach, Verhulst, Edelbrock, Baron,
& Akkerhuis, 1987). Dr. Verhulst and his colleagues
have subsequently published hundreds of studies using Dutch
translations of ASEBA instruments.
Other bicultural comparisons have been reported for ASEBA
data from Australia (Achenbach, Hensley, Phares & Grayson,
1990), China (Weine, Phillips, & Achenbach, 1995), France
(Stanger, Fombonne, & Achenbach, 1994), Greece (MacDonald,
Tsiantis, Achenbach, Motto-Stefanidi & Richardson, 1995),
Jamaica (Lambert, Lyubansky, & Achenbach, 1998), Puerto
Rico (Achenbach, Bird, Canino, Phares, Gould, & Rubio-Stipec,
1990), Russia (Grietens, Hellinckx, & De Munter, 1999),
and Thailand (Weisz et al., 1987, 1989, 1993).
To provide
comprehensive analyses across multiple cultures, a Dutch
child psychiatrist, Dr. Alfons Crijnen, collaborated with
Drs. Achenbach and Verhulst in comparing the CBCL scores
of some 14,000 children from 12 cultures (Crijnen, Achenbach,
& Verhulst, 1997, 1999). Although there were some significant
multicultural differences, CBCL scale scores from most cultures
were remarkably close to the "omnicultural mean"
obtained by averaging scores from all the cultures. Analogous
comparisons of YSR scores from over 7,000 youths in seven
cultures also showed considerable similarity in mean problem
scores (Verhulst et al., 2003).
Subsequent
studies by Dr. Leslie Rescorla and colleagues from dozens
of societies have analyzed tens of thousands of CBCLs from
31 societies, TRFs from 21 societies, and YSRs from 24 societies
(Rescorla et al., 2007a, b, c). The analyses included multicultural
comparisons of scores on the 2001 versions of the syndrome,
DSM-oriented, Internalizing, Externalizing, and Total Problems
scales, age/gender effects, and correlations between mean
item scores for every pair of societies. Dr. Masha Ivanova
and the same international team have tested the 2001 school-age
syndrome structure by performing confirmatory factor analyses
(CFAs) on CBCLs, TRFs, and YSRs used in Dr. Rescorla's studies
(Ivanova et al., 2007a, b, c). The data from all societies
analyzed were found to fit the 2001 syndrome structure.
An integrative overview of multicultural findings from both
the empirically based and diagnostically based approaches
is available in Multicultural
Understanding of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology: Implications
for Mental Health Assessment. The Bibliography
of Published Studies Using the ASEBA lists over 2,000
publications under the "cross-cultural/multicultural"
keyword.
Analogous
multicultural research has been done with the CBCL/1½-5
and C-TRF, as reported by Ivanova et al. (2010) and Rescorla
et al. (2011) and in the Multicultural
Supplement to the Manual for the ASEBA Preschool Forms &
Profiles (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2010).
