METHODS
Participants
Two groups of 30 father-child dyads, a clinic-referred group and a non-referred comparison group, participated in the study. All dyads met the following inclusion criteria: 1) The child was between 3.0 and 7.0 years old; 2) English was the primary language spoken in the home; 3) The father and child had no history of mental retardation; 4) The child's receptive vocabulary skills were at or above a standard score of 70 as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Revised (PPVT-R; Dunn & Dunn, 1981), with no apparent speech delay.
The 30 father-child pairs comprising the clinic-referred group were selected from a sample that was referred to the Child Study Laboratory at the University of Florida Health Sciences Center for treatment of the children's externalizing behavior problems. The children and their parents had been assessed in the Child Study Laboratory for inclusion in a treatment outcome study (Schuhmann et al., 1998). Children included in the clinicreferred group had met diagnostic criteria for Oppositional Defiant Disorder based on their parent's responses to a structured interview designed to yield DSM-Im-R diagnoses. Parents signed a standard consent form indicating that information about their family would be used for research purposes, and data used in this study were routinely collected as part of the standard procedures for all families being assessed for inclusion in the larger treatment outcome study. To be included in the present study, the father-child 31