The Child Consultation Rating Scale

Abstract

A consultation psychopathology rating scale is described for use in assessing psychopathology in pediatric patients and their families in a tertiary care general teaching hospital setting with high acuity and rapid patient turnover. The scale is composed of twelve consultation variables, thirty patient variables, and fourteen parent variables. It includes a global rating and a DSM-III-R diagnosis for both parent and child. Pilot findings using the scale are described for sixty pediatric patients and thirty controls. Interrater reliability using Kendall nonparametric correlations between raters was obtained for each variable and achieves significance ranges from p < .05 to p < .001. Applications to training pediatric and psychiatry residents in the systemic observation of child psychopathology are discussed.