ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: This study aims to develop a Korean version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ-Kr). METHODS: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire that can be completed by the parents within 5 minutes and used to assess the psychopathology (prosocial behaviour, hyperactivity, emotional problems, conduct problems, and peer problems) of 4-16 year olds. The SDQ was translated into Korean, retranslated back to English, and corrected after discussion with the original developer and trial test. The reliability and validity of the SDQ-Kr was evaluated by working with 347 parents of nonclinical (n=98), pediatric outpatient (n=92), and psychiatric outpatient (n=157) children. RESULTS: Working with 62 parents of nonclinical children, the test-retest reliability of 5 subscales of SDQ-Kr was 0.94-0.84 (p<0.01). For 190 nonclinical and pediatric children, internal consistency of 5 subscales of SDQ-Kr was 0.80-0.50 (Cronba-ch's alpha). Factor analysis generated the five identical factors with the five subscales explaining 49.5% of total variance. For 347 children of nonclinical, pediatric, and psychiatric group, ANOVA showed that any two among the three groups was significantly different in subscales and total difficulties scores, except between pediatric and psychiatric children in emotional problems subscore (p<0.01). The discriminating rate among three groups was 75.5% in discriminant analysis. CONCLUSIONS: The Korean version of SDQ shows very similar psychometric performance to the original SDQ developed by Goodman. This study gives evidence of the usefulness of the SDQ-Kr as a promising screening instrument for epidemiological research and clinical purposes.