About the Measure
| Domains | Social Emotional |
| Subscales | Total score and five subscales: emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity,/inattention, peer relationships, prosocial items. Also possible to derive an impact score. |
| Target Construct | Social emotional: Emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity and inattention, peer relationship problems and prosocial behaviour. |
| Description | The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 3-16 year olds. It exists in several versions to meet the needs of researchers, clinicians and educationalists. Each version includes between one and three of the following components: psychological attributes, impact supplement and follow up questions. |
| Test Authors | Goodman, R. N. |
| Publisher | DAWBA (1997 (new norms 2011-2013)) |
| Psychometry | |
| Implementation |
Implementation details
| Respondent | Parents or educators |
| Prior knowledge Required | There is no minimum licencing to use the tool |
| Scoring | Hand scoring not recommended; online scoring available with syntax for different statistics programmes. Important to remember social scale scores need to be transformed |
| Time | One sided version with 25 items, administration time approximately 5 minutes |
| Age | 3 years to 16 years |
Psychometric details
| UK norms | YES |
| Norm / Criterion referenced | Norm referenced |
| Standardisation sample | 11457 |
| Reliability | A high level of internal consistency was reported (mean α= .73 for the different SDQ scores and informants) |
| Criterion validity | Correlations with 'real world outcomes' |
| Construct validity | Research studies confirm a five factor structure. Total difficulties and total impact scores were all satisfactory (α=.80 or above). Internal consistency of self-report peer problems score was noticeably low (α=.41) |
| Concurrent validity | Correlations among parent, teacher, and self-report SDQ scores are moderate. For Dutch sample older children significant correlations between self-report and Child Behaviour Check-List; Parent version of the Child Depression Inventory; Parent version of the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale; Parent version of the ADHD Questionnaire. |