Assessing the child psychopathology beast: a reply to Achenbach and Dumenci's (2001) commentary

This article is a response to T. M. Achenbach and L. Dumenci's (2001) commentary concerning L. J. Lengua, C. A. Sadowski, W. N. Friedrich, and J. Fisher's (2001) article proposing an alternative scoring approach for the Child Behavior Checklist. The authors note that T. M. Achenbach and L. Dumenci do not comment on the stated goals of the alternative scoring approach and focus on a limited set of the results to make their argument. Although the original and proposed scoring approaches operate similarly, important differences suggest that the proposed scoring approach is promising for use in specific instances, including identifying distinct etiologies, developmental course, and co-occurrence of specific syndromes. The importance of combining rational and empirical approaches in articulating conceptual definitions and developing measures of child psychopathology is discussed.