The Application of Principal Component Analysis in the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and exploring the Mental Health Status of Foreign Spouses` Children via SDQ
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Yang, Jing-Jung
Abstract
Objectives：We established the norms and evaluated the reliability and validity of SDQ in elementary school students in Taiwan. We then used principal component analysis to reduce the original variables of SDQ in order to yield a simplified version of SDQ. Finally we compared the mental health status using SDQ between foreign spouses’ children and non-foreign spouses’ children and also tried to identify the possible risk factors that influence the mental health status.
Methods：We selected three regions of Changhua county, including Changhua City(city), Erhlin Town(town), and Dacheng and Fangyuan Country(country) in the light of probability proportionate to size(PPS) sampling. We collected 1250 elementary school students to complete the parent, teacher, and self-report versions of SDQ by their parents, teachers and themselves. The distributions of original scores of SDQ were specified. We determined the cutoff of normal, borderline and abnormal scores of SDQ and calculated the prevalence of high risk group of children and adolescent mental disorder in foreign spouses’ children. We assessed the internal consistency of SDQ via Chronbach’s alpha and the inter-rater correlation via pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient. We used principal component analysis to analyze the structure of SDQ and to assess the variations of the 25 questions of SDQ in our study group. We selected adequate numbers of subset original variables that capture the items accounting for large variation to make a simplified version of SDQ. Finally, we applied the linear mixed model to assess the mental health status between foreign spouses’ children and non-foreign spouses’ children and other possible risk factors, including gender, grade, region, mother’s and father’s education level, the martial status of their parents , living with their parents or not, having siblings or not, family annual income. We regarded three kinds of outcome as dependent variables, the scores of total difficulties of SDQ ,the scores of simplified SDQ and the probabilities of entering high risk group of children and adolescent mental disorder, and those factors mentioned above as independent variables.
Results：We collected valid SDQ questionnaires, including teacher version for 1008 copies, parent version for 1008 copies and student version for 356 copies. We described the norms , the cutting points of normal, borderline and abnormal scores of SDQ and the prevalence of high risk group of children and adolescent mental disorder in foreign spouses’ children. The three versions of SDQ revealed high internal consistency except the domain of peer problems in parent and student versions. The inter-rater correlations were so low as to reflect different viewpoints of the three observers and the different scores between the three versions. We selected 6 and 13 questions of parent version, 5 and 7 questions of teacher version and 6 and 13 questions to represent mini- and simplified versions of SDQ via PCA. Finally, we analyzed the data via the linear mixed model and reached better goodness of fit. Except the finding that the group of ‘east-south Asia and others’ got poorer scores of mental health status via simplified version of SDQ, we found there were lack of obvious differences between foreign spouses’ children and non-foreign spouses’ children in their mental health status in another two assessments. The region of country, male, low family annual income and living with their parents or not were the risk factors responsible for higher scores of total difficulty of SDQ, poorer scores of mental health status via simplified version of SDQ and high risk group of children and adolescent mental disorder.
Conclusions：The mini- and simplified versions of SDQ can capture lots of variations of mental status of elementary school students in Taiwan via less questions and is helpful for comprehensive screening. By taking the scores of total difficulty of SDQ as the outcome, the mental health status between foreign spouses’ children and non-foreign spouses’ children was lacking of difference . However, we paid attention to the finding that the group of ‘east-south Asia and others’ yielded poorer scores of mental health status via simplified version of SDQ which considered the aspects of strengths.
Subjects
Norms
Reliability
Validity
Principal component analysis
Foreign spouses` children
SDGs
Type
thesis
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