On how mental health issues were assessed.
"The measurement approach taken by the COVID-19 Schools Infection Survey (SIS) is to use parent-reported measures for primary school-aged pupils and self-reported measures for secondary school-aged pupils. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire is used to define "probable", "possible" and "unlikely" mental disorders using a scoring algorithm."
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Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)
SDQ is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 3 to 16-year-olds. It exists in several versions to meet the needs of researchers, clinicians and educationalists. The questionnaire asks about 25 attributes, some positive and others negative. These 25 items are divided between 5 scales:
- emotional symptoms (5 items)
- conduct problems (5 items)
- hyperactivity or inattention (5 items)
- peer relationship problems (5 items)
- prosocial behaviour (5 items)
The SDQ also includes an impact supplement which asks whether the respondent considers the child or young person to have difficulties, how long they have been present, and the extent to which they cause distress and impairment in functioning in everyday life.
Responses provided in the SDQ were combined using a diagnostic algorithm to indicate whether each child was unlikely, possibly or probably demonstrating a mental health condition in the following domains: emotional, behaviour and hyperactivity disorders. This algorithm combines data from all available informants and a disorder is considered probably present if the scores on the relevant symptom indicate the child is above the 95th percentile and the impact score is two or above according to either informant for emotional difficulties and conduct problems, or two informants if available for hyperactivity. A disorder is considered unlikely if the scores for conduct and emotion were three or below from all informants, and hyperactivity was five or below, plus impact scores were zero. A disorder was considered possible with intermediate scores. More detail on how the algorithm works can be found on the SDQ website.
For the Schools Infection Survey (SIS), we have adapted this methodology in light of only obtaining information from the pupil questionnaire for those aged 11 to 16 years, and only parent questionnaire information for those aged 4 to 11 years. The limitation of our approach is that it is not exactly comparable with other published mental health results, but it provides a measure against a validated methodology."
The SDQ can be found here,
https://www.sdqinfo.org/a0.html. At a brief glance there are, unsurprisingly, many questions that a child with Long Covid might fall foul of.
