title: WISC profiles in child psychiatric diagnosis: sense or nonsense?
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  WISC factor structure, the specificity of WISC factors, and diagnostic correlates of WISC profiles were studied to investigate the contribution of WISC profile analysis to child psychiatric diagnosis.
  
  
  METHODS
  The fit of various factor models was tested and differences between various clinical groups regarding three WISC patterns were studied, using the WISC-RN (the Dutch version of the WISC-R) scores of a group of 465 Dutch children (mean age 11.2 years) referred to a psychiatric clinic.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The traditional factor models were replicated in this study. However, most of the variance in the factors could be explained by an underlying factor, "general intelligence," suggesting that WISC factors measure specific cognitive abilities only to a limited degree. Another important finding is that the various DSM-III-R and Child Behavior Checklist diagnoses could not be distinguished on the basis of WISC profiles.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The data demonstrate that the relationship between WISC factors and specific cognitive abilities and neuropsychological functions needs further clarification in order to improve the validity of the traditional use of WISC profiles as a source of diagnostic information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. J.Rispens@fsw.ruu.nl
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rispens
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Swaab
authors.forename: E J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: van den Oord
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cohen-Kettenis
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: van Engeland
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: van Yperen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002653:Child Behavior Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002665:Child Psychiatry / Q000379:methods; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014888:Wechsler Scales / Q000592:standards*