A study of adoptive children: II. The predictive validity of the Yale Developmental Examination of Infant Behavior

This study of the predictive validity of the infant examination required measures for three classes of information. One class of information emerged from the infant examination; the second class of information described the child at the time of the follow-up study; the third class of information described some relevant facets of the child's environment. Since our sample of subjects was drawn from children who had been examined in infancy at the Yale Clinic of Child Development, many important properties of our sample are determined by the kinds of cases to which the infant examination had been applied at the clinic. Our investigations have sought evidence of predictive validity both with respect to facets of the infant examination which other investigators have not examined and with respect to criteria which other investigators have not employed. Despite the broad basis of our study, we, like the others, have no basis for challenging the hypothesis that the infant examination is without predictive validity. As we have frequently emphasized, however, such a result does not prove that the infant examination has no predictive validity, and one must remember that it is never possible to prove a hypothesis of no relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)