title: The internal validity and acceptability of the Danish SI-3: a language-screening instrument for 3-year-olds.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To document the development of a new parent- and day care-administered screening instrument (the Screening Instrument for 3-Year-Olds [SI-3]) to be used in a newly implemented, educationally motivated population language screening in Denmark. The authors investigated whether the basic principles of the SI-3 were working satisfactorily and studied the acceptability of the instrument.
  
  
  METHODS
  To examine the general properties of the SI-3, 517 children from a population-based sample were screened with the SI-3 instrument, which assesses various receptive and productive language dimensions on the basis of parental checklists and day care staff-administered structured tests. To examine the acceptability of the SI-3, 2 questionnaires were administered and completed by 291 parents and 135 preschool teachers. Result We obtained a distribution with sufficient negative skew to differentiate among children with low scores, and the instrument displayed acceptable psychometric properties for most subscales. Results of the acceptability study suggest that the acceptability of the SI-3 is high among parents and day care staff, which supports a high attendance rate.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The SI-3 captures a variety of language skills and is good at differentiating children in the lower end of the tail; it is thereby suitable for population language screening, although results indicated the need for some revision.
authors.affiliation: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark. bleses@sdu.dk
authors.forename: Dorthe
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bleses
authors.forename: Werner
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Vach
authors.forename: Rune N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Jørgensen
authors.forename: Torben
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Worm
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D002656:Child Day Care Centers; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology; D011594:Psychometrics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires