PSC-17 remains valid measure of kids' psychosocial functioning: study

By Megan Brooks

NEW YORK - The Pediatric Symptom Checklist-17 (PSC-17) remains a reliable tool to gauge psychological functioning in children, some 15 years after it was first derived, new research shows.

Despite extensive use of the parent-completed PSC-17 (http://bit.ly/2blLMVq) for more than a decade, there has not been a large-scale replication of the original derivation study, until now.

Dr. J. Michael Murphy, of the Child Psychiatry Service, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues examined the prevalence of positive screens, reliability, and factor structure of PSC-17 scores in a new national sample and compared them with the derivation sample.

They had data on more than 80,000 children 4 to 15 years old whose parents filled out the PSC-17 from 2006 to 2015 via the Child Health and Development Interactive System (CHADIS), an electronic system that presents and scores clinical measures.

According to the results online August 12 in Pediatrics, rates of positive screening on the overall PSC-17 (11.6%) and on the internalizing (10.4%) and attention (9.1%) subscales were on par with rates found in the original derivation sample, although the rate of externalizing problems was lower than in the derivation sample (10.2% vs. 17%). This difference could due to differences in sampling, secular trends, or demographic factors, the researchers say.

"Reliability was high (internal consistency 0.89; test-retest 0.85), and a confirmatory factor analysis provided support for the original 3-factor model," they note.

"The current study," they write, "provides strong evidence supporting the continued use of the PSC-17 as a brief psychosocial screen for children and adolescents in primary care."

"We spent a year or two crunching the numbers and wrote the paper to share with the world what we had found," Dr. Murphy, one of the developers of the PSC-17, noted in a phone interview with Reuters Health.

"In a nutshell, it tells us that when you use the PSC-17 in the real world with a national sample of kids you get pretty much the same kind of (results) you got 15 years ago when it was created," he said. "The PSC-17 has been adopted and used worldwide in huge numbers because it's free, it's brief and it's validated. It can be used clinically and in research."

The study had no commercial funding. Two of the authors are the creators and owners of the Child Health and Development Interactive System and receive salary from its licensing and use.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2bb1PYp

Pediatrics 2016.

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