The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire among Finnish school-aged children and adolescents

Abstract

The emotional and behavioural problems of 7- to 15-year-old Finnish children and adolescents (n = 735) were assessed in a community population by a brief screening instrument, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). The parent-, teacher- and self-reports of the SDQ were obtained. The results show that for the total scores, the inter-rater agreement between the pairs of reports was 0.38-0.44. The internal consistency in all three questionnaires was 0.71. Functioning above the 90th percentile of the SDQ total difficulties scores in parent-, teacher- and self-reports was strongly associated with help-seeking variables and problematic behaviour according to parents. The correlation of the parental SDQ total scores and the Child Behaviour Checklist total scores was 0.75 and the correlation of the self-report SDQ total scores with the Youth Self Report total scores was 0.71. The differences in sex, grade and informants of the SDQ total difficulties scores are reported. The study gives further evidence of the usefulness of the SDQ as a promising screening instrument for epidemiological research and clinical purposes.

Screening for psychopathology in child welfare: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) compared with the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA)

“…The concurrent validity of the SDQ, assessed by the correlation with the corresponding ASEBA-questionnaires, was good. The parent SDQ-CBCL correlation was lower than that reported by Goodman and Scott [21], comparable to that reported by van Widenfelt et al [43] and Klasen et al [28], and higher than the results found by Koskelainen et al [29], Muris et al [35] and Van Leeuwen et al [42]. The latter reported caregiver SDQ-TRF correlations similar to our results.…”

New evidence of factor structure and measurement invariance of the SDQ across five European nations

“…Ordinal alpha in the countries ranged from .75 (Germany) to .85 (France). Although still adequate, lower internal consistency values were found in the Conduct and Peer problems subscales, similarly to previous studies [40,18,25,11,24,59,22,17,20,19]. It is worth noting that previous studies analyzing the internal consistency of the SDQ were made through Cronbach's Alpha.…”

“…We further hypothesized that the factor structure underlying the SDQ scores would be invariant across cultures. Moreover, we hypothesized that internal consistency of the scores would be adequate for the Total difficulties score and in all of the subscales, with possible decrease in the Conduct and Peers problems subscales according to previous studies [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]11,24,25]. 19.4%), and 17 years (n = 104; 12.2%).…”

“…Nevertheless, several studies have detected low values of reliability (Cronbachs's alpha ˂ .60), especially in the Conduct problems and Peer problems subscales [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]11,24,25]. An added value of the test, as it the fact that it contains positive items, could be a key factor in explaining low internal consistency and the inconsistency of factorial solutions [26].…”

Long-Term Behavioral Consequences of Infant Feeding: The Limits of Observational Studies

“…The SDQ has been used widely in Europe and more recently in North America, and studies have demonstrated its reliability and validity, as well as its cross-cultural validity. [19][20][21][22][23] It has been translated, validated, and standardized in Russian. The polyclinic pediatricians also distributed the teacher's version of the SDQ (identical to the parent version) to teachers of children who had started formal schooling by the time of their followup visit.…”