The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a screening questionnaire for emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents ages 2 through 17 years old, developed by child psychiatrist Robert N. Goodman in the United Kingdom.
The combination of its brevity and noncommercial distribution have made it popular among clinicians and researchers.
Overall, the SDQ has proved to have satisfactory construct and concurrent validity across a wide range of settings and samples.
[2][3][4] It is considered a good general screening measure for attention problems,[5] although the sensitivity and specificity are not both over .80 at any single cut score, so it should not be used by itself as the basis for a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
The SDQ has been translated into more than 80 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese.