Epidemiological comparisons of American and French children: Parent reports of problems and competencies for ages 6-11.

We compared problems and competencies reported by parents on the Child Behavior Checklist for 1842 demographically matched nonreferred French and American children. American children tended to receive higher competence scores, while French children tended to receive higher problem scores. Scores were higher for French than American children on more Internalizing items than Externalizing items. Nearly all nationality differences were small according to Cohen's (1988) criteria. There were few main effects of sex or age group, and fewer significant interactions. Findings are compared with findings on the Child Behavior Checklist in Holland, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Thailand.