Confirmatory factor analysis of the BRIEF2 in a sample of youth with Down syndrome.

The analysis combined data from six separate studies, including a national online survey, so the sample was not one single recruited cohort. IQ composite scores were missing for several participants, and the study could not examine whether IQ affected the factor structure. The sample was mostly White and mostly not Hispanic or Latino, so the results may not represent all children with Down syndrome. The confirmatory models did not add error correlations or cross-loadings, so the fit may not be optimal. The three-factor model fit better than the two-factor model, but most fit indices were moderate, and the behaviour and emotion indices were very closely related. Chi-square differences can be affected by sample size, and other fit indices differed only slightly between the two- and three-factor models. The analysis used age-normed T-scores, so it did not test whether the factor structure was the same across ages. The measure relied on parent report of behaviour in the home, not direct performance or teacher report.

This work was supported by NIH grants, the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the Lejeune Foundation and the Jack Rubinstein Foundation for Developmental Disabilities. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as proof that children with Down syndrome have separate behaviour, emotion and cognitive regulation deficits. The study tested how parent-report scores grouped together, and the behaviour and emotion ratings were very closely related, so the measure may not separate them clearly.