Preschool-age children come to mental health clinics for
services, manifest serious and sometimes harmful behavior, and
demonstrate impaired functioning as a result of behavioral and
emotional problems (1). Yet currently there is no widely
endorsed method for assessing clinically significant disruptive
behavior problems in preschool children. This is a serious
impediment to the goals proposed by the Surgeon General in the
recent conference on children’s mental health, which include
identifying early indicators for mental health problems,
supporting research in developmental psychopathology that will
clarify diagnoses, and encouraging early identification of
mental health needs in preschool, education, and other systems
(2). Although DSM-IV is the most widely used nosologic system
for children, the majority of the fieldwork conducted for the
DSM-IV was based on samples of school-age children and
adolescents (3). Emerging research has demonstrated the clinical
significance of disruptive behavior problems in pre