Functional assessment and functional analysis are processes that have been applied successfully in work with people who have developmental disabilities, but they have been used rarely with students who experience emotional or behavioral disorders. In the present study, five students in elementary school programs for severe emotional disturbance…

Few studies have explored the subjective mental health of adolescents with intellectual disabilities, while proxy ratings indicate an overrepresentation of mental health problems. The present study reports on the design and an initial empirical evaluation of the Well-being in Special Education Questionnaire (WellSEQ). Questions, response scales,…

The Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) category is a psychopathological entity few have described and is poorly, and mainly negatively, defined by autism exclusion. In order to limit PDD-NOS heterogeneity, alternative clinical constructs have been developed. This study explored the reliability and the diagnostic…

Purpose: Accurate description of an individual's communication status is critical in both research and practice. Describing the communication status of individuals with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities is difficult because these individuals often communicate with presymbolic means that may not be readily recognized. Our goal was…

Background: Observational measures of parent and child behaviours have a long history in child psychiatric and psychological intervention research, including the field of autism and developmental disability. We describe the development of the Standardised Observational Analogue Procedure (SOAP) for the assessment of parent-child behaviour before…

Objectives: Most of the fine-motor assessment tools used in Hong Kong have been designed in Western countries, so there is a need to develop a standardized assessment which is relevant to the culture and daily living tasks of the local (that is, Chinese) population. This study aimed to (1) develop a fine-motor assessment tool (the Hong Kong…