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, including sign language. 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) of SDQplus self-entered assessments of a class of 12 students; the entire assessment took approximately 10 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 SDQ system is used across the world, including North America, Brazil, the UK and Europe, Qatar, India, Australia and New Zealand. The map (right) shows SDQ and DAWBA activity on Wednesday, 18 December 2019 just after 22:00 GMT.
We have released an improved assessment tool (SDQpro) for using the SDQ with groups of young people and are taking on new clients. Note that SDQpro will replace the old SDQcohort and SDQplus systems, which will go offline by 2026.
For a demonstration of SDQpro, assistance with migrating existing data to the new platform, or any other questions, please contact Jan & Jake at sdqpro@youthinmind.com.