title: Sleep items in the child behavior checklist: a comparison with sleep diaries, actigraphy, and polysomnography.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The Child Behavior Checklist is sometimes used to assess sleep disturbance despite not having been validated for this purpose. This study examined associations between the Child Behavior Checklist sleep items and other measures of sleep.
  
  
  METHODS
  Participants were 122 youth (61% female, aged 7 through 17 years) with anxiety disorders (19%), major depressive disorder (9%), both anxiety and depression (26%), or a negative history of any psychiatric disorder (46%). Parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist and children completed a sleep diary, wore actigraphs for multiple nights, and spent 2 nights in the sleep laboratory. Partial correlations ([pr], controlling for age, gender and diagnostic status) were used to examine associations.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Child Behavior Checklist sleep items were associated with several other sleep variables. For example, "trouble sleeping" correlated significantly with sleep latency assessed by both diary (pr(113) = 0.25, p = .008) and actigraphy (pr(105) = 0.21, p = .029). Other expected associations were not found (e.g., "sleeps more than most kids" was not significantly correlated with EEG-assessed total sleep time: pr(84) = 0.12, p = .258).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Assessing sleep using the Child Behavior Checklist exclusively is not ideal. Nonetheless, certain Child Behavior Checklist items (e.g., "trouble sleeping") may be valuable. Although the Child Behavior Checklist may provide a means of examining some aspects of sleep from existing datasets that do not include other measures of sleep, hypotheses generated from such analyses need to be tested using more rigorous measures of sleep.
authors.affiliation: Goldsmiths, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. a.gregory@gold.ac.uk
authors.forename: Alice M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Gregory
authors.forename: Jennifer C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Cousins
authors.forename: Erika E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Forbes
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Trubnick
authors.forename: Neal D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Ryan
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Axelson
authors.forename: Boris
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Birmaher
authors.forename: Avi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sadeh
authors.forename: Ronald E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Dahl
mesh_terms: D056044:Actigraphy; D000293:Adolescent; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D057189:Checklist; D002648:Child; D002653:Child Behavior Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010552:Personality Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017286:Polysomnography; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D007319:Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires