Smedje et al. (1999) SDQ Flashcards
What is SDQ an abbreviation of?
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire
What is SDQ?
It is a test which examines the mental health of children in regards to their social strengths and weaknesses
How many items does the SDQ comprise of?
25 items
Which subscales do these items divide to?
5 scales: Prosocial, Hyperactivity, Emotional Symptoms, Conduct Problems, Peer Problems.
Four of these subscales indicate difficulties, one does not, which do you think indicates strengths?
Prosocial
The SDQ was further developed from another questionnaire, which?
The Rutter Questionnaire
What do the items consist of and how are they rated?
Each item consists of a statement which is then rated “not true”, “somewhat true”, or “certainly true” by the participant.
How many items adress strength and how many items adress difficulties?
10 items adress strengths
14 items adress difficulties
1 item is considered neutral but is counted as a difficulty
How are the ratings scored?
A rating of “somewhat true” is always scored as 1
A rating of “not true” scores as 0 on difficulty items and 2 on strength items
A rating of “certainly true” scores 2 on difficulty items and 0 on strength items
When judging a questionnaire’s internal validity what are you juding? and what test is used to do this?
Internal validity is also sometimes called reliability. It’s concerning the internal consistency of the experiment or questionnaire; making sure that there is a somewhat causal link between items, subscales and ratings in this case.
This can be done for questionnaires and tests by a statistical test called Cronbach’s Alpha.
What are good correlations for cronbach’s alpha when testing a questionnaire’s internal validity?
Generally the requirements are very high.
A correlation of 0.7 is considered somewhat decent while a correlation of 0.8 is good.
A correlation of 0.9 is very good.
What are the strengths of this study of the SDQ?
Good sample.
A good negative correlation between the strength subscale and the difficulty scales.
44.5% of the variance is explained by the five subscales.
What are the weaknesses of this study of the SDQ?
Internal validity:
Many individual items have by themselves a somewhat low correlation.
A Cronbach’s alpha of 0.76 and a split-half reliability of 0.78 is good. But three of the subscales were low: Emotional symptoms 0.61; conduct problems 0.54; peer problems 0.51.
