The Computerized Dominic for Children 6 to 11

Reliability, factor structure, and measurement invariance of the Dominic Interactive across European countries: Cross-country utility of a child mental health self-report.

“…The Dominic Interactive is a child self-report screening instrument comprising 81 items that represent symptoms of the seven most prevalent DSM-IV mental health problems in school children and also match the DSM-5 criteria for: SPh, SAD, GAD, MDD, ODD, CD, and ADHD. The Strengths and Competencies scale consists of 10 positive items (Valla, 2000). The instrument is fully computerized, enabling children to independently answer the questions, automatically saving the answers (“Yes” coded as 1 and “No” as 0) and summing up the scale scores.…”

“…Comparison with DSM-5 showed no differences in item content. See Figure 1 for an example of an item of the Dominic Interactive (Valla, 2000).…”

“…With CCFA, the binary response scales of the items are represented by thresholds; the input for the analysis is a matrix with tetrachoric correlations and thresholds. In accordance with DSM-IV syndrome composition (Valla, 2000), some items are assigned to more than one scale (e.g., “irritability” is a symptom of GAD, MDD, and ODD). However, this hinders a simple CFA; therefore, we allocated overlapping items to the original scale.…”

“…The Dominic Interactive, a pictorial computerized self-report instrument for screening mental health problems in primary school children (Valla, 2000), has been shown to be a valid alternative that partly overcomes these barriers. Traditionally, there are two approaches to conceptualize child mental health problems.…”

“…The items of the Dominic Interactive cover each of the symptoms as described in DSM, except for two that were considered to be developmentally inappropriate. All items (both text and pictures) went through an extensive selection procedure entailing clinical expert judgment, qualitative child evaluations, and statistical testing (Valla, 2000; Valla, Bergeron, Bérubé, Gaudet, & St-Georges, 1994; Valla, Bergeron, Bidaut-Russell, St-Georges, & Gaudet, 1997). Ten items that reflect positive behaviors comprise the Strengths and Competencies scale.…”