Measurement of Psycho-social Well-being among Displaced Children: Strengths and Difficulties of Common Assessment Approache

• In Event: 2-059 - Psychological Well-Being of Refugee Children

Integrative Statement

While stakeholders converge on the importance of understanding, protecting, promoting children’s psychosocial well-being in humanitarian contexts, they are limited in their ability to use evidence-informed approaches to doing so due to the dearth of high-quality measurement tools that are feasible for use in humanitarian contexts. As such, practitioners and researchers are increasingly turning to the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) – a 25-item scale originally designed and validated for use with children ages 4-16 in White, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries – given its demonstrated feasibility as well as its ready availability in over 70 languages (Goodman, 1997. But surprisingly few studies have rigorously established the reliability, validity, and/or comparability of the SDQ in either low-income countries or in humanitarian contexts (Woerner et al., 2004). To address this gap, the current study uses exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) psychometric methods to examine the reliability and underlying factor structure of data collected using the teacher-report version of the SDQ in school-based samples of refugee and displaced children ages 5-10 in Lebanon, the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI), and Nigeria. By testing whether a common factor structure can be identified first within three country contexts and then across these contexts, this paper provides evidence as to whether – and if so, how – the SDQ can be used to reliably, validly, and comparably assess children’s psychosocial well-being in humanitarian contexts.

Data for this analysis were collected at the start of the 2015-2016 school year from Syrian refugee children in Lebanon (n = 1,195) and KRI (n = 389) and displaced children in Northern Nigeria (n = 1,055) as part of routine monitoring efforts by an international NGO providing non-formal education services in that area. Country samples were randomly split stratified on gender into (1) an exploratory sample, to examine using EFA techniques multiple versions of data-driven models, of which a final proposed solution was selected based on conceptual and empirical considerations; and (2) a confirmatory sample, to test hypothesized and proposed factor structures, thereby building confidence in the stability of empirically derived EFA estimates (Osborn & Fitzpatrick, 2012). All models used a WLSMV estimator with probit-link function (Beauducel & Herzberg, 2006; Lei, 2009) adjusting for the nested data structure, and estimates were used to calculate model-based reliability. Measurement invariance testing across contexts was conducted following procedures in Millsap (2012).

Results of the CFA suggest that the SDQ does not assess teachers’ perceptions of the domains of children’s psychosocial well-being that it is hypothesized to measure in WEIRD contexts (Table 1). However, exploratory analyses indicated that within each humanitarian context, three factors could be identified in the data that corresponded to internalizing, externalizing, and social behavior domains (Table 2). The similarities and differences in the items that indexed these domains – both from what was hypothesized in WEIRD contexts as well as across humanitarian contexts – suggest tremendous complexity in how psychosocial well-being is understood by teachers and manifest within and across contexts. Results of invariance tests and implications for future scale development will be presented.

Authors

• Carly Tubbs Dolan, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Lawrence J. Aber, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author