EBD Blog

How many students have Emotional and Behavioral Disoders? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%, or even more? What is the true prevalence of EBD?

Some children and youth with problems in the emotional and behavioral area have difficulties that do not rise to the level of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. Reasonable adults know that every individual experiences bumps along the road. But what counts as a legitimate Emotional or Behavioral Disorder, not just a bump in the road?

This begs the question of how we define EBD. That’s a serious issue, one that policy makers should examine. And they should turn to the extant data about what’s normal. There are plenty of data that address this point.

The philosophical side of the question about what is normal turns, in part, on the question of whether “normal” is defined as what’s “right” or what’s “average” (borrowing from Ullman & Krassner). Some behavior among children and youth (say, sexual contact with peers) may be common (i.e., average) but not socially acceptable (i.e., ideal). Societies must wrestle with this matter, and social mores (e.g., religious views) often enter in the discussion.

But, another way to examine this matter is to ask how often people (parents, teachers, and individuals themselves) report that children and youth display behaviors that are so unusual that they are abnormal. Is, for example, Jim’s nosepicking such a problem (he really gouges the nostrils all day long!) that it’s more frequent and more severe (deeper pentration) than 99% of other children? Well, if the answer is “yes” and we consider nosepicking an inappropriate behavior, then it’s a problem. It’s abnormal.

It turns out that researchers have lots of data about the important others’ (parents, teachers) ratings of of children and youths’ behavior. Some kids do things that are generally out of the range or normal often and over extended periods of time. Sometimes, multiple raters—parents and teachers or teachers over several years—give similar ratings to the same youths.

If there is convergence among these ratings, wouldn’t one think that they represent problems worth examining? I’d say, “Yes.”

My colleagues and I are examining all the empirical studies we can find that report data about the prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems among school children. If we find that scientifically trustworthy studies show a higher prevalence of EBD among school children than the percentage of students identified by the research samples, we’ll have to suggest alternative explanations for the findings.

What might those explanations be? Why are more (or fewer) students with EBD identified in the US schools than are pesent in the population, according to prevalence research?