Comparing the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and the Child Behavior Checklist: is small beautiful?
The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief behavioral screening questionnaire that can be completed in 5 minutes by the parents or teachers of children aged 4 to 16; there is a self-report version for 11- to 16-year-olds. In this study, mothers completed the SDQ and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) on 132 children aged 4 through 7 and drawn from psychiatric and dental clinics. Scores from the SDQ and CBCL were highly correlated and equally able to discriminate psychiatric from dental cases. As judged against a semistructured interview, the SDQ was significantly better than the CBCL at detecting inattention and hyperactivity, and at least as good at detecting internalizing and externalizing problems. Mothers of low-risk children were twice as likely to prefer the SDQ.
Goodman
R
R
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London, United Kingdom.
Scott
S
S
D002648:Child; D002653:Child Behavior Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*