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

Jorge Gaete*, Jesus Montero-Marin, Daniela Valenzuela, Cristian A. Rojas-Barahona, Esterbina Olivares, Ricardo Araya

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0191809
Pages (from-to)1-18
Number of pages18
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume13
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 5 Feb 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by: 1. Joint project—New Learning Environments and Technologies—AKA-EDU/15, Academy of Finland (http://www.aka.fi/en) and CONICYT, Chile (http:// www.conicyt.cl) to JG; 2. Chilean National Grant for Research and Development in Health—FONIS-EVS-13I0100, CONICYT, Chile (http://www.conicyt. cl) to JG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Gaete et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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