Poster #93 - Validation of the Parent-report Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in Rural Ghana

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

Increased demand for school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions has spread across the globe. Generating evidence of the efficacy of these programs in low-resource contexts, and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) specifically, rely on measures developed in North America or Europe; even though only a handful of these measures are validated in their own contexts (Halle and Darling-Churchill, 2016). Given that social and emotional skills develop within the ecology of cultural and societal norms (Jukes et al., 2018), the need to test the psychometric properties of SEL measures across different socio-cultural contexts is urgently needed. In this presentation, I will address this gap by discussing results from a validation study of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) from a sample of rural school-aged children in Northern Ghana.

The SDQ was initially developed as a mental health screening tool (Goodman & Goodman, 2009), but is often used to measure SEL in low-resource contexts. The instrument has 25 items designed to measure five constructs: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems, and prosocial behaviors. The sample for our analysis comes a parental engagement intervention in Northern Ghana where the SDQ was administered to the caregivers of 2,253 children (Mage = 7.4 years, 46% girls).

Given that the psychometric properties of the SDQ are understudied in this context, we first employed confirmatory factor analysis to first verify the hypothesized 5-factor solution. Our results demonstrated poor model fit (χ2(df = 265) = 20838.41, p < .000; CFI = .60; RMSEA = .11; SRMR = .12). We then randomly split the sample to conduct both exploratory factor analysis and confirm the best-fitted factor solution. A reliable 3-factor structured emerged (Table 1) with factors representing strengths (prosociality and self-regulation), internalizing problems, and externalizing problems. A CFA of the 3-factor solution on the second random half of the sample demonstrated a good fit (χ2(df = 186) = 1005.75, p < .000; CFI = .95; RMSEA = .045; SRMR = .059). Invariance tests did not reveal evidence of considerable noninvariance across gender (Table 2) and age (Table 3).

Our results reinforce the need to rigorously test SEL measures across a variety of socio-cultural contexts. We hope that by sharing our results at SRCD, we can be part of a larger conversation around developing and testing SEL measures globally with the goal of improving children’s social and emotional well-being, particularly within SSA.

Authors

• Autumn Brown, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Emily M Weiss, University of Pennsylvania

• Noelle Suntheimer, University of Pennsylvania

• Elisabetta Aurino, Imperial College London

• Richard Appiah

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania