The Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist is a set of descriptions of children's behavior that may be rated by a child's parent. This checklist is based on the literature dealing with observers' reports of children's behavior in a number of different settings and consists of items that have been shown to cluster together into six relatively independent dimensions or scales (Aggression, Inhibition, Activity Level, Sleep Disturbance, Somatization, and Sociability) . The scales can be rated with reasonable reliability, and the scale scores, based on ratings by mothers, discriminate at least two groups of clinically different children. The dimensions of the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist appear to be sufficiently independent, reliable, and discriminating to warrant further use as one approach to the quantitative evaluation of the behavior of children.

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A narrowly defined MMPI profile and the behavior pattern associated with it in three different clinical settings are described. The MMPI profile pattern, with the psychopathic deviate and hysteria scales elevated in a particular configuration, entailed a behavior pattern that includes hostile-aggressive acting out. The hostile-aggressive behavior pattern characterized most men with this MMPI profile in each of three settings studied. The frequency of this profile pattern and the social and psychological importance of the behavior pattern associated with it suggest that clinical investigators can profitably study this group of men. The method used to establish the relationship between this particular MMPI profile and the hostile-aggressive behavior pattern is recommended for more general use.

The question at issue now, as it was in 1954 when Meehl's book Clinical versus Statistical Prediction was published, is how may we best, most accurately and most efficiently predict the socially, clinically, and theoretically significant characteristics and behaviours of our patients. In the introduction to his book Meehl said ‘My thesis in a nutshell: there is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are equally suited for any given kind of task, or that their comparative effectiveness is the san*e for different tasks. Current clinical practice should be much more critically examined with this in mind than it has been.’

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