title: Good test--retest reliability for standard and advanced false-belief tasks across a wide range of abilities.
abstract: Although tests of young children's understanding of mind have had a remarkable impact upon developmental and clinical psychological research over the past 20 years, very little is known about their reliability. Indeed, the only existing study of test-retest reliability suggests unacceptably poor results for first-order false-belief tasks (Mayes, Klin, Tercyak, Cicchetti, & Cohen, 1996), although this may in part reflect the nonstandard (video-based) procedures adopted by these authors. The present study had four major aims. The first was to re-examine the reliability of false-belief tasks, using more standard (puppet and storybook) procedures. The second was to assess whether the test-retest reliability of false-belief task performance is equivalent for children of contrasting ability levels. The third aim was to explore whether adopting an aggregate approach improves the reliability with which children's early mental-state awareness can be measured. The fourth aim was to examine for the first time the test-retest reliability of children's performances on more advanced theory-of-mind tasks. Our results suggest that most standard and advanced false-belief tasks do in fact show good test-retest reliability and internal consistency, with very strong test-retest correlations between aggregate scores for children of all levels of ability.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London, UK. clare.hughes@iop.kcl.ac.uk
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hughes
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Adlam
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Happé
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jackson
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Caspi
mesh_terms: D001076:Aptitude; D001364:Awareness; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D011581:Psychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D011936:Reality Testing; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012938:Social Perception; D014888:Wechsler Scales / Q000706:statistics & numerical data