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and represent compliance across the three situations. The compliance ratios reported in the present study are fairly similar to the previous DPICS II study with mothers (Bessmer, 1996). In her study of mother-child dyads, Bessmer (1996) found that the clinic-referred children were compliant with 53% of their mother's commands compared to the nonreferred group who were compliant with 75% of their mother's total commands. Robinson and Eyberg (1981), who defined compliance as compliance to all commands regardless of opportunity to comply, found that children referred for behavior problems had 48% compliance to commands compared to 62% compliance for non-referred children.
Second, the frequency of inappropriate behaviors (i.e., whining, yelling, criticism and sarcasm) was quite different between the groups. Clinic-referred children averaged approximately 50 inappropriate behaviors in the 30-minute observation period while the non-referred children engaged in an average of 29 inappropriate behaviors in the same length of time. Other observational studies have also found that clinic-referred children engage in higher rates of deviant behavior with their fathers than normal children (Eyberg & Robinson, 1982; Stormshak, Speltz, DeKlyen, & Greenberg, 1997; Webster-Stratton, 1985).
The prosocial behaviors of the children, however, were not found to be
significantly different between the clinic-referred group and the comparison group. This finding is consistent with the findings ofBessmer (1996) and Patterson (1976) who also did not find codable differences in the prosocial behaviors of conduct-disordered children with their mothers. In this study, prosocial behavior was operationalized as the sum of