Nonprofessional and professional help-agents' views of interventions with young maladapting school children.

The expectations of nonprofessional and professional help-agents about helping interventions with young children experiencing different types of school adjustment problems (i.e., aggressive-acting out, shy-anxious, and learning problems) were studied. The two groups responded similarly. Shy-anxious children were seen as most appropriate for the intervention, the easiest and most enjoyable group to work with, and as having the best prognoses. These four sets of judgments were relatively independent of each other. A connection was made between the current data and prior findings suggesting that shy-anxious children have more favorable treatment outcomes than other groups.