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The cross-cultural sensitivity of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ): a comparative analysis of Gujarati and British children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Manasi Kumar  and
Peter Fonagy
Manasi Kumar
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi, Kenya, email manni_3in@hotmail.com
Peter Fonagy
Affiliation:
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK, email p.fonagy@ucl.ac.uk
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The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) may be considered a reliable measure of child behaviour, social functioning and adjustment in an Indian Gujarati context. The sample comprised 351 children who were classified as coming from a ‘poverty’ or ‘non-poverty’ background. The means and standard deviations for the SDQ total and five behavioural scales, as rated by children themselves, were first calculated for the entire Gujarati sample, then for the poverty and non-poverty subgroups. The SDQ did prove to be an appropriate measure for behavioural assessment. Its cross-cultural sensitivity was ascertained by comparing it against a British normative population. Small effect sizes were seen in the Emotional subscale scores and scores for total difficulties, and medium and large effect sizes on the Prosocial and Peer subscales, respectively, with greater difficulties experienced by the Indian Gujarati sample than their British counterparts.

Type
Research Paper
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 42 - 45
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2013

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