SDQ - pre-school children

About the study

Since 2010, staff at early years establishments (nurseries) funded by Glasgow City Council have been completing the Goodman' Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) for children in their pre-school year.

The SDQ is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire for children. It covers five areas: Conduct Problems, Hyperactivity/inattention, Peer Relationship Problems, Emotional Symptoms and Pro-social Behaviours. The first four of these are rated negatively (that is, they pick up difficulties in children). These can be added together to give a Total Difficulties score, which shows an indication of overall difficulties that the child is experiencing. The final area, Pro-social Behaviours, is a positively scored scale, so it shows things the child does e.g. ‘is helpful if someone is hurt or upset’. The Total Difficulties score and the sub-scale scores can be split into groups which indicate whether a child has no difficulties, possible difficulties or likely difficulties. It is these groups in relation to child characteristics which are explored below.

In Glasgow City, SDQs are currently being collected at 30 months (through Health Visitors), at age 4-5 in nurseries and in Primary 3 and Primary 6. This analysis reports on results from Pre-school SDQs in the academic years 2011/12 and 2012/13 combined (data collected in February/March of each academic year).

The information and graphs presented on these pages has been kindly provided by NHSGGC