The BBAS is 48 item parent report questionnaire that determines behavioral adjustment
in 4 to 14 year old children. Behavioral adjustment is defined by 5 areas of functioning:

Behavior in social relationships (parents, sibs, teachers, etc);
Achievement (schoolwork, homework, chores, hobbies);
Self-Relations (self-esteem, self-care, self-regulation);
Internal State (contentment, anxiety, mood, thought processes);
Coping (identifying, solving, persisting, etc);
Symptoms (eating, sleeping, elimination, etc).

The BBAS was developed by William B. Carey MD and Sean C. McDevitt, PhD and standardized on 415 children aged 4-14. It was designed to avoid some of the problems of commonly used scales currently in use with children, such as lack of focus on behavioral assets and tendency to be too global or have too many items.

BBAS functions as:

• A behavioral inventory of personal strengths and weakenesses
• A comprehensive review of environmental stressors and assets
• A "symptom" checklist in special behavioral areas
• A "datacatcher" for mental health history in biological relatives
• A behavioral rating scale of specific aspects of current adjustment
• A norm referenced test of behavioral adjustment in 5 important areas
  

Norms indicate how an individual child is adjusted compared with others in the same age group. The scale has good internal and retest reliability and there is evidence of discriminant validity in clinical vs. nonclinical subsamples. Dr. Carey presented the BBAS validity data at the 2002 Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics meetings in Seattle, Washington.

The BBAS takes about 15 minutes to be completed by a rater, usually the primary caregiver. The BBAS can be scored by hand, using a profile sheet, or on the internet by coding a specially designed questionnaire form and processing the data into a clinical report suitable for use by a qualified professional.

With online scoring, the questionnaire results are detailed in a 3 page report that permits a view of individualareas of functioning as well as overall adjustment in the BASICS categories.