The Development of a Brief Screening Measure of Emotional Distress in Children

Abstract

We report several studies developing a parent-rated measure of emotional distress for children in Singapore, with the key objectives being to derive a very brief valid measure of global distress. The refined item set comprised behaviourally expressed broad manifestations of emotional distress. Three developmental studies were undertaken, with the first two involving parental ratings on the measure for validation against clinician-rated distress levels, while also testing two rating options for the measure. We established clear comparative advantages to the rating anchors used in the Revised Rutter Scales. High inter-rater agreement was established across parental ratings, with the latter finding supporting objectives for the measure. Paternal scores correlated more strongly than maternal scores with clinician-generated distress scores. Additional properties of the measure were tested in a large community sample of nearly 2,000 Singapore schoolchildren in their last 2 years of primary school, allowing prevalence estimates and mean scores to be derived for each item. Here, girls and boys received identical total scores, scores were also independent of the number of children in the family and of ordinal position, and mothers returned higher scores than fathers.