Diagnostic efficiency and validity of the DSM-oriented Child Behavior Checklist and Youth Self-Report scales in a clinical sample of Swedish youth

The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Youth Self-Report (YSR) are widely used measures of psychiatric symptoms and lately also adapted to the DSM. The incremental validity of adding the scales to each other has not been studied. We validated the DSM subscales for affective, anxiety, attention deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD), oppositional defiant (ODD), conduct problems (CD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in consecutively referred child and adolescent psychiatric outpatients (n = 267) against LEAD DSM-IV diagnoses based on the K-SADS-PL and subsequent clinical work-up. Receiver operating characteristic analyses showed that the diagnostic efficiency for most scales were moderate with an area under the curve (AUC) between 0.70 and 0.90 except for CBCL CD, which had high accuracy (AUC>0.90) in line with previous studies showing the acceptable utility of the CBCL DSM scales and the YSR affective, anxiety, and CD scales, while YSR ODD and OCD had low accuracy (AUC<0.70). The findings mostly reveal incremental validity (using logistic regression analyses) for adding the adolescent to the parent version (or vice versa). Youth and parent ratings contributed equally to predict depression and anxiety disorders, while parent ratings were a stronger predictor for ADHD. However, the youth ADHD rating also contributed. Adding young people as informants for ODD and OCD or adding the parent for CD did not improve accuracy. The findings for depression, anxiety disorders, and ADHD support using more than one informant when conducting screening in a clinical context.