Abstract
Exploiting nation-wide data from the Danish National Birth Cohort, we show that children’s emotional and behavioral problems measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) are closely related to their performance in standardized academic tests for reading and mathematics in sixth grade. The relationship is remarkably linear across the entire distribution for both the total difficulties score and subscale scores of the SDQ; higher scores on the SDQ (more problems) are related to worse performance in academic tests. We assess the similarity across respondent type; parent (child age 7 and 11), teacher (child age 11) and self-reported scores (child age 11), and find that teacher and parent reported scores have very similar slopes in the SDQ–test score relationship, while the child reported SDQ in relation to the academic test performance has a flatter slope.
Highlights
While individual behavior and mental health are interesting outcomes in themselves, the growing literature on the importance of these characteristics for educational achievement and labor market outcomes [1,2,3,4] has sparked the demand for validated instruments
Less is known about how the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) relates to measures of academic test performance across respondent type and child age
Using data from Statistics Denmark and a largescale nation-wide birth cohort, we show that emotional and behavioral problems as measured by the SDQ are closely related to student performance in standardized academic tests of reading and mathematics in sixth grade
Summary
While individual behavior and mental health are interesting outcomes in themselves, the growing literature on the importance of these characteristics for educational achievement and labor market outcomes [1,2,3,4] has sparked the demand for validated instruments. One widely used potential candidate for measuring children’s emotional and behavioral problems is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), which is increasingly used by economists, sociologists [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], and by other professionals. Less is known about how the SDQ relates to measures of academic test performance across respondent type and child age. The objective of this paper is twofold: First, we assess how the SDQ is related to performance in standardized academic tests across three respondent types (parent, teacher, and child self-reported scores) and two age-levels of the child (age 7 and 11). We exploit our sample size to nonparametrically identify the functional form of the relationship between
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