Exploring the clinical implications of the international CS reference data for children and adolescents (Meyer, Erdberg, Shaffer, 2007)

Meyer, Erdberg, and Shaffer (2007) pointed to significant variability across nonpatient samples of children and adolescents included in the Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 2003) international project. Consequently, Meyer et al. stated that applying standard interpretive guidelines for children and adolescents would result in some inaccurate inferences about mental health and recommended inferring difficulties in a child's protocol in cases in which a score on a given variable deviates from the most extreme normative samples' mean. In this Comment, we explore this idea and provide the clinician with basic guidelines for interpreting young patients' protocols in which structural data are used jointly with developmental and contextual factors. We present these guidelines in relation to a case study.