A COMPARISON OF THE CHILDREN’S FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT RATING SCALE AND THE CHILD BEHAVIOR CHECKLIST USED IN A WRAPAROUND PROGRAM

The criterion related validity of the Children’s Functional Assessment Rating Scale (CFARS) was examined by comparing the assessment’s selected scores to the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) selected scores taken from child psychological evaluations in a Pennsylvania wraparound program. There is no clear evidence that a study has attempted to determine the CFARS criterion related validity using a correlation between the CFARS and norm-referenced measure (e.g., the CBCL) for validation purposes. Therefore, scores from the relatively new CFARS and the norm-referenced CBCL were collected and analyzed at two different time points in order to determine if there was a significant correlation. This quantitative study used archived scores from 91 child and adolescent participant evaluations. There are seven domains from each assessment that are similar and CBCL t-scores and CFARS severity scores for the domains were compared using a Pearson correlation analysis. The results indicated that all seven domains of the CFARS showed significant correlation to all seven domains of the CBCL at both time points. Therefore, the results of the data analysis from the seven select domains help further understand the criterion related validity of the CFARS through validation against the norm-referenced CBCL. Conclusions of this study were discussed and there are recommendations for future research. Based on the results, this study should help introduce more psychologists and clinicians to the CFARS assessment tool, which is already being used in several states with success. ii