Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale-2 Parent Report: Exploring a Spanish Version with At-Risk Students.

The ability to identify strengths is a crucial component of psychoeducational assessment. Longitudinal research has found that youth strengths are as important to consider as their deficits for understanding developmental trajectories (Garmezy, 1993). Strengths help students and their families avoid negative outcomes and achieve healthy development. Moreover, understanding strengths allows for more accurate and effective intervention and treatment plans (Jimerson, Sharkey, Nyborg, & Furlong, 2004). Thus, strength-based assessment has the potential to identify important individual and environmental factors to consider when understanding students' treatment needs and may also promote intervention success through relationship building.In response to the now well-established link between strengths and outcome, psychologists have begun to incorporate a strengths approach with the traditional deficit-focused model to promote understanding the internal and external factors that influence a child's abilities and disabilities. With strength-based assessment in its infancy, it is unknown whether strength-based concepts apply with diverse populations. Precedent in deficit-based assessment indicates the multicultural robustness of assessments such as the Achenbach scales (Rescorla et al., 2007). Achenbach and colleagues (2008) have studied the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment across more than 70 cultures and found somewhat different relevance of constructs among groups but relatively consistent findings across cultures. They also found that scores varied more within than between groups. In a summary of their findings, the researchers concluded that understanding the differential functioning of various assessments within and across cultural groups is important (a) to diversify normative data, (b) to compare recent immigrants to nonimmigrant functioning from the same country of origin, and (c) to further enhance the accuracy of diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. Validated through multicultural norming, strength-based assessment has the potential to inform more accurate diagnosis and treatment of multicultural youth with behavioral disorders.Although very little multicultural research has been applied to strength-based assessment, there is debate among scholars regarding the consistency of positive psychology traits across cultures. Peterson and Seligman (2004) have conducted the most extensive multicultural research in positive psychology to date. They examined character strengths across numerous cultural groups and found 24 individual virtues present in all cultures, which led them to conclude that positive traits transcend culture. Yet other scholars argue that a cultural context is always required to understand the role of strengths for diverse people, and the same strengths are not equally relevant across cultures (Snyder & Lopez, 2007). A reasonable hypothesis is that a variety of virtues or positive traits are likely to be strengths across cultures, but the relative value or use of these traits in diverse cultures and their relation to success may vary within and between cultures (Pedrotti & Edwards, 2010). The only way to understand the influence of various positive traits across cultures is to measure them with instruments that have multicultural validity.The Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale-Second EditionThe Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale-Second Edition (BERS-2) Parent Rating Scale (PRS) is one of the most widely used measures to examine school-based strengths of students (Furlong, Sharkey, Boman, & Caldwell, 2007). The BERS-2 was developed for the Children's Mental Health Services System of Care Project (Center for Mental Health Services, 2001), which involves wraparound services for children with emotional and behavioral disorders, and was subsequently implemented for the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Families Program (Center for Mental Health Services, 2001). …