engleski

Strengths and difficulties in Croatian pre-school children: Validation study

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) presents the measure of children and youth psychological adjustment, well-being and mental health and it has been widely used. It contains of 25 items within ten of them reflect strengths and 15 of them reflects difficulties in children’s behavior. Based on that it is possible to generate five different subscales: emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems and prosocial behavior. Regarding the importance of measures development in the field of developmental psychopathology in our country, the main aim of this study was to test the factor structure and reliability of this instrument. Twenty-nine pre-school teachers voluntarily participated in this study with the role of assessing strengths and difficulties in the sample of 416 pre-school children. The average age of children was M = 5.00 (SD = 1.17) in the range from 1.5 to 7.5 years. 241 of them were boys and 220 of them were girls. After getting the informed consent from pre-school teachers, parents and managers of randomly chosen kindergartens in Primorsko-goranska county, pre-school teachers rated children’s behavior on the SDQ. With the aim of testing SDQ validity, confirmatory factor analysis on principal components with Oblimin rotation was run. Determined results confirmed expected five- factor structure of SDQ what has explained 57.35% of total variance. Reliability analysis has resulted with moderate to high Cronbach alphas for each subscale: emotional symptoms (α = .73), conduct problems (α = .78), hyperactivity (α = .84), peer problems (α = .78) and prosocial behavior (α = .63), so they could be improved. Determined findings have demonstrated that SDQ application on Croatian sample has satisfactory psychometric properties and can be used for measuring well-being and mental health dimension among pre-school children.

Pre-school children ; Reliability ; Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire ; Validity

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