Lending “Strength” to the Assessment of Preschool Social-Emotional Health

Abstract

This paper compares the advantages of a strength-based perspective to the long-standing pathology-based approach to assessment. Theoretical advantages to strength-based assessment, such as greater compatibility with early prevention efforts and increased acceptance by multiple stakeholders, are suggested. The Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA), a reliable measure of within-child protective factors in preschoolers, is used to empirically validate the utility of strength-based assessment. The authors found the DECA to discriminate between groups of preschoolers with and without emotional and behavior problems, the DECA Total Protective Factor Scale to predict group membership just as well as the DECA Behavioral Concerns Screener, and the DECA assessment of protective factors to predict behavioral concerns as well as a standardized assessment of risk. These empirical findings, combined with the presented theoretical rationale, indicate that a strength-based perspective and the resilience model have great utility for universal use with preschool populations.