An identified barrier to the widespread adoption of universal socioemotional and behavioral screening in schools may be that existing instruments may be too burdensome or costly to administer. As a result, the County Schools Mental Health Coalition came together to develop a common assessment system, the Early Identification System (EIS). The…

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) self-report form is a brief 25-item measure that assesses the psychological adjustment of youth. Although widely utilized as a screening tool, a lack of consistent psychometric evidence undermines the SDQ's utility as a sound diagnostic tool for all youth. This study focused on examining the…

This study investigated the effect of item position on descriptive statistics, psychometric information, and factor structure of the Pediatric Symptoms Checklist 17-item social-emotional screening instrument (PSC-17). The goal was to determine whether item position, either grouped by factor or mixed across constructs, produced similar results.…

The Emotional and Behavioral Screener (EBS) is a recently developed teacher-reported brief screening instrument for identifying students who are at-risk of an emotional or behavioral disorder (EBD). Although prior research supports the technical adequacy of scores from the EBS, there is a gap in the literature regarding strong evidence of the…

The factor structure of the Teacher-Child Rating Scale (T-CRS 2.1) was examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A cross-sectional study was carried out on 68,497 children in prekindergarten through Grade 10. Item reduction was carried out based on modification indices, standardized residual covariance, and standardized factor loadings. A…

Objective: Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the factor structure of the 6-item version of the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6). Methods: A subsample of emerging adults, aged 18-29 (n = 20,699), from the 2013 National Survey of Drug Use and Health were used in this study. Results: Each of the models (one-factor, two-factor…

Contemporary mental health assessment conceptualizations focus on both well-being and distress. This study presents initial validation information for the "Social Emotional Distress Survey--Secondary" (SEDS-S), which was designed for school-based complete mental health screening that employs brief self-report measures of well-being and…

The Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale has been used for more than 20 years to measure students' sense of school belonging, yet its psychometric properties have had limited examination with pre-adolescent children. This study investigated the utility and psychometrics of the PSSM in three primary school samples from the United…

In the Response to Intervention framework, a psychometrically sound screening tool is essential for identification of children with emotional and behavioral risk. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist-17 (PSC-17) screener in school-based settings. Forty-four teachers rated 738 preschoolers using…

Research Findings: Despite it being a widely accepted measure of social, emotional, and behavioral problems among children and young people, the factor structure underlying the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is contested. Recent research has suggested a need to consider methodological bias in the SDQ, associated with the positive…

Parent empowerment involves the ability of caregivers to meet the needs of their family while maintaining feelings of control and is particularly important for families of children at-risk. It is necessary to establish reliable and valid tools to measure parent empowerment. The purpose of this study was to examine the internal factor structure,…

The factor structure of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Grades 1 through 3 (PALS 1-3), a widely used early literacy screener in the Commonwealth of Virginia, was investigated using a large sample of public-school second-grade students (n = 14,993). Three alternative factor models (i.e., a one-factor, two-correlated factors, and a…

R. Goodman's Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is widely used to measure emotional and behavioral difficulties in childhood and adolescence. In the present study, we examined whether the SDQ measures the same construct across time, when used for longitudinal research. A nationally representative sample of parents (N = 3,375) provided…

This study validated a parent-report measure of the Parenting and Family Adjustment Scales in a Chinese cultural context through investigating 650 Chinese parents. The results provided evidence for satisfactory reliability and validity of Parenting and Family Adjustment Scales in a Chinese context, which is thus promising to be used for Chinese…

Numerous well-validated academic progress monitoring tools are used in schools, but there are fewer behavioral progress monitoring measures available. Some brief behavior rating scales have been shown to be effective in monitoring students' progress, but most focus only on students' social skills and do not address critical academic-related…