Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 20

The ASEBA was developed by Dr. Thomas Achenbach in the 1960s in order to provide clinicians with a tool for assessing psychopathology in children and adolescents (Achenbach, Rescorla, & Maruish, 2004). At that time, the DSM provided very little information about mental illness in childhood. To develop the ASEBA, he first developed self‐report questionnaires that asked about all types of psychopathological symptoms. Using factor analysis, Dr. Achenbach was able to determine which symptoms co‐occurred with one another and seemed to “hang together.” This allowed him to identify different psychological syndromes, similar to how groups of symptoms are listed under a disorder in the DSM. Today, when a clinician or researcher uses one of the measures of the ASEBA, they can use computer software to score the questionnaire and create a symptom profile displaying their score on each syndrome. Using norms established by studying large pools of people of the same age and gender, these profiles indicate how severe a person’s symptoms are compared to others like them. The ASEBA is a “bottom up” approach to understanding and classifying psychopathology and the scales are dimensional because they do not create distinct categories (e.g., those with depression and those without).