The Strengths and
Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), was invented by child psychiatrist Professor
Robert Goodman MD PhD (right). The SDQ is the world’s most-used instrument for
assessing mental health status for people in the age range 2 to 18.
Since 1998, over 4500
clinical and academic studies have been based on the SDQ and over 5
million assessments of young people have been carried out on one website
alone. The SDQ typically takes 3-5 minutes to complete, can be administered by
non-clinical staff and is available in over 75 languages. The SDQ will
detect symptoms in most of those who have serious mental health
disorders.
Thanks to the generous contributions of SDQ members, longitudinal
assessments, improved reports and innovative visualizations of the data have been
developed. New variants of the original application,
SDQplus
and SDQcohort,
are available at no additional charge and greatly
increase the value of the SDQ in all domains. See the visualistion (right, identifiers redacted)
of SDQplus self-entered assessments
of a class of 20 students; the entire assessment took approximately 15 minutes. For those working
with young people on a one-to-one basis, the SDQplus offers powerful new
software tools for visualising and communicating SDQ metrics.
SDQscore.org is the original, continuously improved,
website for transcribing and
scoring SDQ paper questionnaires; SDQplus.org
is the new site. All sites operate 24 hours a day, 365 days per
year from secure servers within the European Union.
The map (left) shows SDQ and DAWBA activity on Wednesday, 18 December 2019 just after 22:00 GMT.