The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale for Children: A Reliability Study

Abstract

Forty-eight children and adolescents with widely varied presenting problems were interviewed by paired clinician-raters to evaluate the reliability of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale for Children (Overall & Pfefferbaum, 1982), a 21-item rating scale that provides a descriptive profile of child and adolescent psychopathology. Eighteen of the 21 scales appeared adequately reliable when examined individually. All seven composite factor scores proved acceptably reliable, suggesting the advantage of using those composite scores for the evaluation of treatment effects in the child and adolescent patient populations.