AAMD Adaptive Behavior Scales consist of two parts. The Part I is to measure the functional aspect of adaptive behavior and the Part II is to assess the aspect of behavioral problems or maladaptive behavior for the mentally retarded. In our previous reports on factor analytic studies based on 27 subdomain scores in Part I and 13 domain scores in Part II separately for each group of 1971 retarded children younger than 13 years old and 4121 retarded adolescents or adults of 13 years of age or older, three orthogonal primary factors in Part I and two primary factors in Part II which were common to these two age groups were uncovered. The factors revealed in the analysis for part I were named "Personal Independence", "Social Adjustment" and "Personal-Social Responsibility", and the factors in Part II were defined as "Antisocial-Aggressive Behavior" and "Self-Stimulative Behavior" from the subdomains or domains having relatively large loadings for each of them. In order to reconfirm these factor structures in two parts of A. B. Scales and to study the relationship between the factor structure of functional aspect of adaptive behavior measured by Part I and the structure of maladaptive behavior measured by Part II of the Scales, further factor analytic studies were carried out on the basis of 40 variables from these two parts together. This is a report of the studies. As results of factor analyses by complete centroid method (Table 3 and 4) and principal factor method (Table 10) on these 40 subdomain and domain scores of the Scales for each of two age groups, five significant primary factors common to these groups were disclosed. After rotation along to varimax criterion, it was found that these five factors were the same as ones emerging repeatedly in our previous analyses in each of two parts (see from Table 3 to 10), and that these factors were retained without mixture of the two parts of the Scales. Therefore, the functional aspect of adaptive behavior and the aspect of behavioral problems or maladaptive behavior are considered as independent of each other in the orthogonal factor space. In addition to these findings, the change-over in the order of contribution between the factor of "Personal Independerce" and "Social Adjustment" according to increase in age level was also replicated in this analysis. Although the orthogonal factor structures in this series of analyses are not necessarily simple according to Thurston's criteria, we can conclude that the functional aspect of adaptive behavior is made up from three components and the aspect of maladaptive behavior has two latent components, and that these two aspects are completely independent of each other.
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