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Social and emotional development:Indigenous children’s strengths and difficultiesIn wave 3, primary carers were asked a set of 25 questionsabout children’s social and emotional behaviour.This set of questions, referred to as the Strengths andDifficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), was developed by RobertGoodman for the behavioural screening of 3 to 16 yearolds(Goodman 1997). The SDQ is used in social research,clinical assessments, epidemiology, evaluations ofoutcomes of everyday practice, and specific interventionsin child and adolescent mental health services. The SDQis widely used in Europe, Asia and the United States, andhas been used in other surveys in Australia, most notablyin the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) 22and the Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey(WAACHS). 23The SDQ provides valuable information about children’sbehaviour, and can be used as a major outcomemeasure of children’s emotional development. Whilethis report presents only a brief analysis of this measure,further research would be beneficial to shed more lighton how this behavioural measure is related to children’ssocial functioning and academic performance, andbroader factors such as family characteristics, life eventsand parental background and attitudes. Future waves ofdata collection may also provide more information abouthow the children are progressing, what factors affect theiremotional development and how the measure impactson other aspects of their lives.The SDQ allows attribution of a score for the child’s socialand emotional behaviour across five domains, or scales:emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity,peer problems, and prosocial behaviour. The first fourscales measure various aspects of behavioural difficulties,while the prosocial scale measures strengths. Anexplanation of the aspects of behaviour measured byeach scale is presented below:• Emotional symptoms scale measures the generallevel of confidence, and is based on such indicatorsas the child having many worries or fears, often beingunhappy, downhearted or tearful, being nervous orclingy in new situations and easily losing confidence.• Conduct problems scale consists of items related toconduct and compliance, such as whether the childoften loses their temper; whether he/she is generallywell behaved and usually does what adults request;or whether the child often fights with other children orbullies them. 24• Hyperactivity scale measures perseverance andattention span, and includes questions on whetherthe child is restless, overactive and can be easilydistracted; or whether he/she can stop and thinkthings out before acting, and can see tasks through tothe end.• Peer problems scale measures ability to developand maintain relationships with peers, and includesquestions that ask respondents to identify whether thechild tends to be solitary or whether he/she has at leastone good friend; whether the child is generally liked byother children or is picked on and bullied by them.• Prosocial behaviour scale summarises the child’spropensity to engage in actions that benefit others,such as helping, donating and volunteering. This scalereflects whether the child is considerate of otherpeople’s feelings, helpful if someone is hurt or upset,and kind to younger children, and whether the childshares readily with other children or often volunteersto help.The score for each scale is based on five questions. Foreach question, the primary carers rated the behaviourof children on a three-point scale (coded 0 for ‘Not true’,1 for ‘Somewhat true’ and 2 for ‘Certainly true’). The scoresfor individual questions were added to create the fivesubscale scores 25 . For the first four subscales, higher scoresindicate a greater risk of problems in each area. Theprosocial scale provides a score for strengths, so higherscores indicate less risk.The scores for emotional symptoms, conduct problems,hyperactivity and peer problems scales were addedtogether to provide an overall difficulties score 26 . Theprosocial scale is analysed separately.As this set of questions is designed for children aged 3years or older, all children under 3 were excluded fromthe analysis. It is worth noting that, while the SDQ is usuallyself-administered (that is, parents mark their answerson a sheet of paper), in Footprints in Time the questionswere posed orally to primary carers in a face-to-faceinterview 27 . Due to the potentially sensitive nature of thequestions, some primary carers might have been reluctantto provide responses to the SDQ. However, of the 1,10822 LSAC is Australia’s first nationally representative longitudinal study of child development, funded by FaHCSIA and conducted in partnership with theAustralian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The survey commenced in 2004 and subsequent waves havebeen conducted two years apart.23 WAACHS was undertaken in 2000 and 2001 by the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. It investigated the health of 5,289 Western AustralianAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people aged 0–17. The SDQ was administered only for children aged 4 years and older.24 The wording of two of the questions in this subscale was different depending on the cohort. In particular, primary carers of the older children(K cohort) were asked whether the child ’often lies or cheats’ while the primary carers of the younger (B) cohort were asked the English (UK) versionfor 3 to 4 year olds (see http://www.sdqinfo.com/py/doc/b3.py?language=Englishqz(UK) ) whether the child is ’often argumentative with adults’.Similarly, the question on whether ’the child steals from home, school or elsewhere’ for the K cohort was replaced with ‘can be spiteful to others’ forthe B cohort.25 If responses for one or two questions within a subscale were missing, the score for that domain was calculated by scaling up the sum of existingresponses. In the cases where three or more questions within a subscale were not completed by the respondent the scale score was set to missing.26 If one or more of the scale scores was missing, the total score was also set to missing.27 This method of collection was also used in WAACHS (De Maio et. al. 2005).72 Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children | Key Summary Report from Wave 3