The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief instrument developed primarily for screening children and adolescents for social-emotional learning. The SDQ contains four factors related to socio-emotional difficulties and one factor related to prosocial behaviour. However, studies of its factor structure have produced mixed results.…

Research Findings: Empathy plays an important role in children's early social-emotional development. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring the different aspects/levels of empathy in preschool children. Moreover, few studies examined the validity of the existing measures for empathy in Chinese children. The present study…

Executive functions (EFs) refer to a set of cognitive skills used to achieve goals and adapt to novelty and social situations. These cognitive skills strongly impact people's daily lives. Hence, assessing these skills is important for an early intervention to address their lack if need be. Nevertheless, relevant scientific literature reports…

Mental health conditions are more prevalent in autistic people than non-autistic people. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire is a commonly used screening tool for emotional and behavioural difficulties in autistic children and adolescents. However, few studies have assessed the psychometric properties of the Strengths and Difficulties…

This paper presents perspectives from early childhood practitioners of pre-school children's (n = 100) social and emotional competencies upon entering pre-school and again after term three of the pre-school year. This research reports findings from five pre-school settings within rural and urban locations. A quantitative approach is used with…

Early childhood education and care (ECE) type (e.g., center-based care, home-based care, informal care) and quantity (i.e., time spent in ECE) have been linked to observed behavioral challenges in children. However, there is a dearth of research on this association in New Zealand. Using data from 6,536 children from the "Growing Up in New…

Background: Early school dropout is an economic, social, and individual problem. School dropout is a result of cumulative processes that occur over many childhood years. Despite the influence of level of education on health outcomes, primary prevention of dropout outside of the school setting is rare. In the Netherlands, the Youth Health Care…

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Social-Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM) (33-66 months), which is designed to assess social-emotional difficulties and behavior disorders in young children. In this case, the SEAM was translated and back-translated. The sample included 2477 preschoolers (1256 boys;…

The goals for the study were threefold. One was to screen for traumatic experiences and challenging behaviors in children who live in an at-risk, deprived environment in Eastern Türkiye. Using a projective technique, second goal was to explore how children in such an environment experienced trauma. Finally, the third aim of the study was to…

This study analyzed the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the teacher-reported Devereux Early Childhood Assessment, Second Edition (DECA-P2) using a sample of 246 children aged between 2 and 6 years old. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine its construct validity. Reliability was evaluated based on the internal…

Although there is a wealth of research addressing the association between mental health and school absenteeism, there are calls for a better understanding of how mental health difficulties might predict SAPs (Egger et al., 2003; Finning et al., 2022; Ingul et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2012). The aim of this paper was to create a more nuanced…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have problems acquiring language, affecting their communicative participation, social--emotional functioning (SEF) and quality of life (QoL). Aims: To investigate whether communicative participation mediates the relation between language and SEF and QoL. Methods & Procedures: In a…

This paper describes the development and validation of an instrument to assess how students deal with emotionally challenging classroom situations (the DECCS Questionnaire). The questionnaire is based on a vignette with one learning and one performance situation in a classroom, and is intended for students in grades 4 to 7. On a sample of N = 639…

Humanitarian research with Syrian refugees can be difficult to conduct in-person, due to COVID-19 containment, security, and logistics issues. We assessed whether the online implementation of a brief, culturally grounded resilience measure would yield reliable responses for use with children and adolescents in the Middle East region. We…

This multiple-manuscript dissertation explored the measurement invariance (MI) testing with multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) approach from different perspectives. Study 1 explored MI from a theoretical perspective by conducting a systematic review study on MI practices in education. The findings of this study indicated…