Abstract
A number of important findings in developmental psychopathology have been made by operationalizing problems in terms of the social context in which they occur and relying heavily on the use of observational assessment to examine them. For example, the coercion theory of Patterson (1982) could not have been developed via the sole use of self-report measures. It came from a conceptualization and methodology that saw the behavior of the child with a conduct problem as being firmly seated in an interactional context, that is, in a family system that reciprocates aggression in self-perpetuating coercive cycles. Support for these ideas was gathered largely through the use of observations of the child interacting with his or her family in natural settings.
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Dadds, M.R., Rapee, R.M., Barrett, P.M. (1994). Behavioral Observation. In: Ollendick, T.H., King, N.J., Yule, W. (eds) International Handbook of Phobic and Anxiety Disorders in Children and Adolescents. Issues in Clinical Child Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1498-9_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1498-9_18
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