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Acknowledgment, Answer, Behavior and Information Descriptions, Laugh, Labeled and Unlabeled Praise, Reflection, and Physical Positive. Interestingly, only when Information Descriptions were removed from the summary variable did significant differences emerge. As mentioned earlier, Information Descriptions can be positive ("I want to play with you"), negative ("I don't want to play with you"), or neutral ("this is a blue car") statements and appeared to be inflating the prosocial behavior variable for both the clinicreferred and comparison fathers. When these statements were removed from the scores, the score for the clinic fathers was reduced from 177 to 70 and from 175 to 90 for the non-referred fathers. The other categories in the summary variable occur less often and more clearly reflect behavior that is responsive and positive toward the child. Griest, Forehand, Wells, and McMahon (1980) found no differences between clinic and nonclinic groups of mothers on total positive attention and contingent positive attention. WebsterStratton (1985) found that Praise was significantly different between clinic and nonclinic groups of mothers, but found no differences between groups on questions, Physical Positive, or a category that included Information Descriptions, Behavior Descriptions, and Reflections.
Although statistically significant differences were found between the two groups on four of the seven DPICS II summary variables, only 60% of the cases were correctly classified in a discriminant function analysis. In contrast, Bessmer (1996) found statistically significant differences on six of the same seven DPICS II summary variables, and found that 87% of the cases could be correctly classified. Based on this study and Bessmer's (1996) study, the DPICS II combined summary variables appear to be more