Estimating adolescent mental health in the general
population: current challenges and opportunities
Louise Black, Margarita Panayiotou, Neil Humphrey
Adolescence is a period of change and increased mental health difficulties, which are important for lifetime outcomes.
Adolescent mental health is therefore an active research area, with large samples often drawing on self-report general
measures (ie, not disorder-specific or focused on a narrow outcome). We argue that these measures have a key role in
our understanding of issues such as prevalence, antecedents, prevention, and intervention, however, measurement
has been given little attention and high-quality measures do not tend to be available or used. We offer insights into
historical and psychometric challenges that have contributed to current problems and highlight the implications of
relying on poor measures, which at their worst can be biased and unethical. We make recommendations for research
and practice on selecting measures and improving the evidence base and make a call to action to reject low-quality
measurement in this field.
For anyone working in adolescent mental health: I *really* recommend reading this important paper about the most commonly used questionnaires (inc SDQ)
In short: most of them have poor psychometric properties, so do we even know what they are measuring?
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
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