BRICKLIN PERCEPTUAL SCALES (BPS)

Purpose: Assess a child’s innermost and deeply felt experiences of each parent during significant life situations

Age: 6 Years and Up

Testing Time: 30 to 35 Minutes

Scoring: Hand-scored with Summary Sheet or use the BPS Computer Scoring Profile

If you are interested in knowing the degree to which each parent can genuinely help and encourage a child to acquire important real-life skills, the BPS is the test you want. Ratings of a child’s perceptions of a parent range from very unhelpful to very helpful.

A test validated by the research on FEELINGS by famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, it measures a child’s experiences with each parent in four critical areas: Competency, Supportiveness, Consistency, and Admirable Traits. It assesses how a child inwardly experiences---feels about--- each parent’s offering of emotional support and information, as well as the parent’s consistency and modeling of admirable traits.

Research suggests that 95% of the choices, decisions and judgements of adults and children are more influenced by feelings than thoughts. People might have many thoughts about some particular choice, but the “select” button is a feeling. Every single thing we think, say, do, hear, write, desire, fear, create, learn, hate, decide, evaluate, remember, fantasize, plan, or dream of is obviously, or subtly, accompanied by a feeling. The way a child or adult FEELS about a judgment is much more likely to be valid than what is said about the judgment---especially in a forensic setting.

In evaluating children with the BPS, there is always an awareness of the child’s sense-of-self, and how this is influenced by his or her perception of social rank. A child’s basic sense-of-self is formed by his or her interactions with each of the parents. The sense-of-self formed by interactions with the parents will influence how the child interprets all the many ways he or she will be “evaluated” by his or her friends in real life as well as via social media. Perceived social status is a prime target in neuroscience research: “Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with (perceived) social status. Researchers found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order.” Cited in: NIH/National Institute of Mental Health. “Human Brain Appears ‘Hard-wired’ For Hierarchy.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 April 2008.

This unique data-based test is the most frequently administered custody test for children.

The BPS is designed for use either in highly adversarial situations (e.g., child custody evaluations), or more ideally, to assist in forging win-win scenarios by showing the parents what each brings to the child.  The test provides information that is useful for a variety of other applications including: family counseling evaluations to assess a child’s perception of his or her differing relationships with parents or other caregivers, psychological evaluations to help determine an appropriate parental role in a child’s intervention or treatment plan.   The BPS is ideal for measuring the pre-post changes that are vital for an evaluator or therapist to know. Other professionals who can use change (and rate-of-change) data are family therapists, clinical social workers, psychiatrists, pastoral therapists, juvenile-offender counselors, marriage counselors, and especially school psychologists and counselors, for whom it is very important to know how helpful (or destructive) each parent is to a child in a learning situation.

Parental communications can either help or frustrate a child’s ability to feel both competent and confident when dealing with the challenges of daily living. Children are far better off when they are helped to have both feelings.

• Competency: the critical skills taught and modeled by parents and measured by the BPS include learning to cooperate with others, self-control, focused and sustained attention, memory acquisition, negotiating calmly, learning, communicating, dealing with emergencies, proper assertiveness, keeping promises and leadership skills.

• Confidence: the BPS measures the foundations of confidence, the degree to which a parent makes a child feel supported, nurtured and appreciated in a wide variety of life situations.

Based on the parenting literature, four main dimensions of parenting have been identified: parental responsiveness, parental positive demandingness, parental negative demandingness, and parental emotion-related coaching. Parental responsiveness, parental emotion-related coaching, and parental positive demandingness are related to children’s higher emotional intelligence, while parental negative demandingness is related to children’s lower emotional intelligence.

Since publication in 1984, the BPS has been administered more than 150,000 times and is accepted and relied upon by family courts in all 50 states. Many court systems purchase the BPS directly.

Complete validity data accompanies each BPS.  Clinical validation studies establish the BPS’s validity, with agreement rates with multiple independent sources ranging from 83% to 100% (n= 3880). Concurrent validity is 91%. Future validity is 87%. Test-retest reliability is 93%.

Contains: Revised BPS Test Manual, 8 sets of BPS Response Cards, 8 Scoring summaries, stylus-pen, placement dots, Response Card box with foam insert, newest validity reports.

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