[Screening childhood behavior problems using short questionnaires I.: the Hungarian version of the Strengths and...

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a short questionnaire suitable for screening childhood behavior problems. Completing the questionnaire requires 5 minutes of parents' or teachers' time. The scales of the original version showed good agreement with relevant scales of the much longer Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). In this study, we report the use of the Hungarian version of the SDQ and results of a comparison between the scales of the SDQ and the CBCL.

Questionnaire data were collected from the parents of 156 six-year-old children from a community sample. Of the 156 children, 89 were participants of the longitudinal Budapest Infant-Parent Study (BIPS).

Internal consistency of the Hungarian SDQ scales were moderate-satisfactory (0.43-0.70), correlations between the relevant SDQ and CBCL scales were as expected (0.41-0.65), showing that the short questionnaire was equally suitable for the detection of problems. In our six-year-old age group, the mean of the total problem scores (11.0) was much higher than the means measured in other Western European countries and North-America. However, in developing countries, such as Brazil or China, levels were higher and closer to the Hungarian mean score.

These initial Hungarian data confirm international experience with the SDQ, i.e., psychometric indices and the distribution of scale scores across the sexes are consistent with the results of foreign studies. On the other hand, a cautious generalization of our results indicates a higher level of problems in Hungary than in Western Europe and other developed countries. We think that following further collection of normative data the Hungarian version of the SDQ, which will take only a few minutes to complete, will be suitable for assessing the mental health of children and adolescents, and for the quick screening of problematic cases.