The Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL), developed based on the conceptual framework of child
developmental psychopathology proposed by Achenbach, has been considered as the most studied instrument in
assessing child behavioural problems. For younger pre-school age children, a specific CBCL/1.5-5 has also been
recently developed. However, this specific form of the CBCL has not been translated into Chinese, and thus not
validated as a Chinese version. The Child Behaviour Scales-Chinese (CBSC) has been developed by researchers
in China for the purpose of providing a useful behavioural assessment instrument for young pre-school children.
Studies were conducted to evaluate the psychometric properties of the CBSC. Results obtained from the
Confirmatory Factor Analysis indicated that 46 items were to be retained from the pool of 60 with a seven factor
structure. Cronhach’s Alpha values for both sexes and total provided evidence for good internal reliability with
values ranging from 0.59 to 0.90. Correlations on all subscales between CBSC and CBCL suggested moderate to
high concordance providing evidence for reasonable convergent validity. The ICC for all subscales and the total
between repeated administrations of CBSC within a period of 4-6 weeks were significantly and moderately high
ranging from 0.52 to 0.72. These preliminary results suggest that the CBSC is a valid instrument for assessing
young pre-school children in China. Studies could be further conducted to provide more evidence on the
externalisation and internalisation factors structure on which the design of the instrument has been based.
