This study examined the in- and out-of-school adaptive behavior of 154 randomly selected Black, Hispanic and White 7-year-old children. Six mea sures of adaptive behavior were used, two ad ministered to each of three sources of information (parents, teachers, and children themselves)— Adaptive Behavior Inventory for Children; Mer cer's Teacher Questionnaire; Children's Adaptive Behavior Scale; and Behavior Rating Profile- Parent, Teacher, and Child. Overall, there was a consistent pattern of within-source correlations among adaptive behavior ratings higher than between-source correlations for the parent and teacher measures. That pattern was particularly clear for the minority samples, an indication of the relative independence of children's adaptive be haviors in home and school settings and the need to obtain information from both sources. The two children's measures were not correlated with each other and were not related strongly to other measures of adaptive behavior from other informa tion sources. Examination of intercorrelations among adaptive behavior measures and between adaptive behavior and indices of ability and school achievement provided some evidence of domains that were being addressed by these measures, with indications of both convergent and divergent validity for the various measures. Finally, multivariate analyses resulted in gender and ethnic group differences, and examination of correlation matrices for each ethnic group suggested possible differential meaning of adaptive behavior scores for the three groups.
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