A Snark or a Boojum? Exploring Multitaxonomic Possibilities and Building on Widiger's Commentary

Abstract

In this reply to Widiger (2005/this issue), we make the following points: (a) Multiple taxonomic strategies should be considered for psychopathology; (b) Achenbach, Bernstein, and Dumenci (2005/this issue) illustrated a top-down, expert-judgment strategy and a bottom-up, statistical strategy for taxonomically organizing 123 problem items; (c) some items had counterparts in research with children, adolescents, and young adults; (d) all items were validated for ages 18 to 59 and many for ages 60 to 98; (e) correlations between DSM-oriented scales and statistically based syndromes were not used to validate the syndromes; (f) the top-down and bottom-up strategies both yielded normed, quantitative scales and categorical cut points; (g) multiple taxonomic approaches can help to avoid reifying categories and labels; and (h) diverse methods for operationalizing patterns of problems should be explored to advance science and practice.