Vineland-II adaptive behavior profile of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or specific learning disorders

Background: The evaluation of adaptive behavior is informative in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or specific learning disorders (SLD). However, thefew investigations available have focused only on the gross level of domains of adaptivebehavior. Aims: To investigate which item subsets of the Vineland-II can discriminate children withADHD or SLD from peers with typical development. Methods and procedures: Student’s t-tests, ROC analysis, logistic regression, and linear discriminant function analysis were used to compare 24 children with ADHD, 61 elementarystudents with SLD, and controls matched on age, sex, school level attended, and bothparents’ education level. Results: Several item subsets that address not only ADHD core symptoms, but alsounderstanding in social context and development of interpersonal relationships, alloweddiscrimination of children with ADHD from controls. The combination of four item subsets(Listening and attending, Expressing complex ideas, Social communication, and Followinginstructions) classified children with ADHD with both sensitivity and specificity of 87.5%.Only Reading skills, Writing skills, and Time and dates discriminated children with SLDfrom controls. Conclusions: Evaluation of Vineland-II scores at the level of item content categories is auseful procedure for an efficient clinical description.