Although prevalence estimates on some individual childpsychiatric symptoms exist, no estimates of overall psychiatrie functioning of children are available for the Dutch population. This fact reflects the lack of basic childpsychiatric epidemiological data in this country. Efforts should be made in order to adjust and test existing epidemiological instruments and methods and make them suitable for scientific and administrative childpsychiatric epidemiological purposes in the Netherlands. Some basic childpsychiatric epidemiological issues are dealt with and those instruments and methods that have been most thoroughly tested on their reliability, validity and applicability are surveyed.
The importance of an integration of multivariate stat stical techniques and the clinical approach is stressed.