Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesPsychometric Properties of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire
Section snippets
Cross-Sectional Sample
In 1999 the Office for National Statistics carried out a survey of the mental health of British 5–15-year-olds. The total sample of 10,438 children was recruited through child benefit records; child benefits are available without means testing and are claimed on behalf of approximately 98% of British children. Details of ascertainment and representativeness have been presented elsewhere (Meltzer et al., 2000). Parents provided questionnaire and interview information on 99% of the sample (with
Factor Analyses
Table 1 shows the rotated five-factor solutions for parent, teacher, and self-report SDQs. A five-factor solution was chosen in each case because this was the predicted number of factors on theoretical grounds. As it happens, use of the “eigenvalue greater than 1.00” rule would have generated similar solutions: there were only five factors with eigenvalues of greater than 1.00 for the teacher and self-report SDQs; and although there were six such factors for the parent SDQ, the sixth factor had
DISCUSSION
The psychometric properties of the SDQ were assessed in a representative sample of ten thousand 5–15-year-olds, all of whom had psychiatric assessments. The findings confirmed and extended previous reports of satisfactory reliability and validity based on studies of smaller community and clinic samples from around the world (García et al., 2000, Goodman, 1997, Goodman, 1999, Goodman et al., 1998, Goodman et al., 2000c, Goodman and Scott, 1999, Koskelainen et al., 2000, Smedje et al., 1999).
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