Conners Comprehensive Behavior Rating Scales™ 2nd Edition (Conners CBRS^® 2)

The Conners CBRS 2 provides a Single-Rater Report that presents detailed information about scores from a single administration. The report compares a youth's scores to an age-based normative sample, identifies elevated scores at both the scale and item level, presents results both numerically and graphically, and includes recommendations for areas that may warrant further investigation.

Reliability:

The Conners CBRS 2 demonstrates strong reliability across raters, scales, and time, supporting consistent interpretation of results.

• Excellent internal consistency across Parent, Teacher, and Self-Report forms, with median alpha coefficients ranging from .86 to .90.
• Strong test-retest reliability, with scores remaining stable over a 2- to 4-week interval, with median correlations ranging from .70 to .87.
• Moderate to strong inter-rater agreement, reflecting expected variability across settings while supporting real-world clinical usefulness, with median correlations ranging from .59 to .79.

Together, these findings indicate that the Conners CBRS 2 scores are consistent, precise, internally coherent, and stable, providing a dependable foundation for decision-making.

Validity

Evidence supports the validity of the Conners CBRS 2 for assessing emotional, behavioral, and developmental functioning.

• Strong structural validity, with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirming that scales align with the intended domain and content structure and fit the theoretical model well.
• Strong classification accuracy, with a median overall correct classification rate of 78.4% across rater forms and clinical groups.
• Strong convergent validity, demonstrated through moderate to high correlations with established measures, including the original Conners CBRS (median r = .73).
• Strong criterion-related validity, with youth from multiple clinical groups (i.e., Specific Learning Disability; Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder; Autism Spectrum Disorder; Disruptive, Impulse-Control, or Conduct Disorder; depressive disorders; and anxiety disorders), showing clear and meaningful score differentiation from the general population in expected domains (median Cohen's |d| = 0.98).

Fairness

The Conners CBRS 2 was developed and evaluated with a strong emphasis on delivering a fair and responsible assessment. Measurement invariance is supported across key demographic variables, including gender, race/ethnicity, parental education level, and country (U.S. vs. Canada).

Specifically, the Conners CBRS 2:

• Shows no gender-related measurement bias across rater forms, supporting the appropriate use of both Combined Gender and Gender-Specific Norms.
• Measures behavior and social-emotional functioning comparably across major racial and ethnic groups, with generally small score differences that align with prior research and indicate results are not driven by test bias.
• Yields Parent and Self-Report results that are consistent across parental education levels, with minimal score differences and no meaningful impact on interpretation.
• Functions similarly for youth in the U.S. and Canada, with highly similar scores supporting fair use and shared norms.

These results support consistent interpretation of scores across diverse populations, aligning with best practices for ethical and defensible assessment use.

The Normative Samples include 4,420 ratings of youth (Parent N = 1,560; Teacher N = 1,560; Self-Report N = 1,300). Participants were drawn from the United States (~90%) and Canada (~10%), reflecting their relative population sizes. Samples are balanced by age and gender and stratified to closely reflect recent census proportions for race/ ethnicity, parental education level, and geographic region (matching within 2%), as well as recent prevalence rates for select clinical groups. This representative foundation supports confident comparison of individual results to relevant peer groups.