Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ)

The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) is a comprehensive parent-report instrument developed to assess temperament in children aged 18 to 36 months. It was designed to provide a more detailed and multidimensional evaluation of toddler temperament than previous assessment tools, addressing the lack of a comprehensive measure specifically tailored to this developmental period.

The ECBQ consists of 201 items distributed across 18 temperament dimensions, most of which represent developmental extensions of constructs originally measured by the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) and the Infant Behavior Questionnaire–Revised (IBQ-R). Additionally, the questionnaire incorporates three dimensions—Social Fear, Activity Level, and Anger/Frustration—adapted from the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire (TBAQ). Parents rate how frequently their child exhibits specific behaviors in common everyday situations using a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from Never to Always.

Unlike earlier temperament measures that primarily emphasized emotional reactivity, the ECBQ adopts Rothbart’s psychobiological model of temperament, conceptualizing temperament as encompassing individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity, together with the self-regulatory processes that modulate these responses. This multidimensional perspective provides a richer understanding of early childhood behavioral characteristics and developmental trajectories.

Psychometric evaluation of the ECBQ demonstrated a stable and theoretically meaningful three-factor structure, identified through principal axis factor analysis across independent validation samples. The three higher-order dimensions are:

  • Negative Affectivity, including Discomfort, Fear, Sadness, Frustration, Soothability (negative loading), Motor Activation, Perceptual Sensitivity, and Shyness.
  • Surgency/Extraversion, comprising Impulsivity, Activity Level, High-Intensity Pleasure, Sociability, and Positive Anticipation.
  • Effortful Control, consisting of Inhibitory Control, Attention Shifting, Low-Intensity Pleasure, Cuddliness, and Attention Focusing.

The robustness of this factorial structure has subsequently been confirmed in cross-cultural validation studies, including Japanese and Russian adaptations of the ECBQ, supporting its applicability across diverse cultural contexts.

The questionnaire demonstrates strong internal consistency, with the majority of subscales exhibiting Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding 0.80, while only a small number of scales showed reliability estimates below the recommended threshold of 0.70. Studies have also reported satisfactory inter-rater reliability between primary and secondary caregivers, as well as significant longitudinal stability, indicating that temperament characteristics measured by the ECBQ remain relatively stable throughout early childhood. Nevertheless, further evidence is still required to strengthen its concurrent, predictive, and external validity.

The developers emphasize that the ECBQ was created to assess typical developmental variation in temperament rather than to diagnose psychological or psychiatric disorders. Although the instrument may provide valuable information in clinical and applied settings, its use is primarily recommended for research purposes, and no empirical evidence currently supports its diagnostic application.