Have the Cross-Informant Syndromes of the CBCL any practical value in identifying grouped ICD10 diagnoses?
120 children referred to a child and adolescent psychiatric service in a university clinic were studied with the aim of deriving predictors for grouped ICD10 diagnoses using the CBCL Cross-Informant-Syndromes (CISs). CIS7 (Delinquent Behaviour) and CIS8 (Aggressive Behaviour) were shown to significantly separate Disruptive Behaviour Disorders from all other disorders. As cross-validation, a separate clinical sample of 118 children from a similar service in another part of the country was used to see to what extent the CIS predictors from the first sample held up in the second sample. Positive and Negative Predictive Powers, all corrected for chance, confirmed that the Disruptive Behaviour Disorder group could be usefully separated from all other disorders using the Delinquent Behaviour and the Aggressive Behaviour Cross-Informant Syndrome scores. There was no good evidence that Emotional (Anxiety-Mood) Disturbance could be usefully separated in the same way using the Anxious-Depressed Syndrome (CIS3) or any other syndrome. Discriminant Function Analysis showed that there was no significant improvement in prediction when more elaborate linear combinations of the syndromes were used.