Mental health among children and adolescents: Construct validity, reliability, and parent-adolescent agreement on the ‘Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire’ in Chile

Abstract

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a screening tool used to measure psychological functioning among children and adolescents. It has been extensively used worldwide, but its psychometric properties, such as internal structure and reliability, seem to vary across countries. This is the first study exploring the construct validity and reliability of the Spanish version of SDQ among early adolescents (self-reported) and their parents in Latin America. A total of 1,284 early adolescents (9–15 years) and their parents answered the SDQ. We also collected demographic variables. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the latent structure of the SDQ. We also used the multitrait-multimethod analysis to separate the true variance on the constructs from variance resulting from measurement methods (self-report vs. parent report), and evaluated the agreement between adolescents and their parents. We found that the original five-factor model was a good solution and the resulting sub-scales had good internal consistency. We also found that the self-reported and parental versions of SDQ provide different information, which are complementary and provide a better picture of the emotional, social, and conduct problems of adolescents. We have added evidence for the construct validity and reliability of the Spanish self-reported and parental SDQ versions in a Chilean sample.

Parent-child agreement in different domains of child behavior and health

“…Behavioral strengths and difficulties were assessed using the parent and child versions of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) [48]. The agreement between parent and child reports completed using the SDQ has already been investigated in several studies [18][19][20]26,27]. The questionnaire comprises 25 questions on five different scales: emotional problems (e.g., feeling depressed or anxious), conduct problems (e.g., aggressive behavior, tantrums), hyperactivity/inattention (e.g., being unfocused or restless), peer-relationship problems (e.g., playing alone, having no friends), and pro-social behavior (e.g., being helpful, sharing things).…”

“…Regarding evaluations of mental/physical health of children, several studies have investigated parent-child agreement in reporting behavioral difficulties [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Overall, in these studies, parent-child agreement was reported to be moderate [18][19][20][21][22] to high [23].…”

“…Whereas most of the studies observed higher agreement in reporting with regard to externalizing problems [22,24,25], others found higher agreement for internalizing problems [20] or no difference for externalizing and internalizing problem behavior [21]. Where differences between children and parents were observed, children tended to report more behavioral difficulties than their parents [19][20][21]27], especially when it came to internalizing problems [26,27]. Factors that have been shown to impact the amount of parent-child agreement in reporting behavioral difficulties are parental engagement, socio-economic status (SES) [19,21], problem behavior/illness on the part of the child [1,18,20], and child age [23].…”

Phantom Phone Signals in youths: Prevalence, correlates and relation to psychopathology

“…The mean score for each subscale was then calculated (range 0–10) and used in the analyses. The psychometric properties of the self-report version of the SDQ are generally good across studies [14, 15, 16, 17]. The alpha values for each subscale were 0.72 for the emotional symptoms subscale, 0.46 for the conduct problems subscale, 0.59 for the hyperactivity-inattention subscale, 0.55 for the peer problems subscale and 0.66 for pro-social behaviour subscale.…”

Assessing the factor structure of the Spanish language parent Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in Honduras

“…This study did not examine measurement invariance or SDQ factor structure, but the findings suggested that some subscales may have been overreported given the low impact attributed by parents. A recent study by Gaete et al [51] assessing the construct validity and reliability of both the self-reported and parent Spanish language SDQ instruments with Chilean adolescents ages 9–15 and their parents found the original five-factor SDQ structure to perform well. As cited by Gaete et al [51], two additional studies on the SDQ were conducted in Chile.…”