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Background: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a screening questionnaire that measures children's emotional and behavioural problems. This study examines the reliability and validity of the Malay parent-report version of the SDQ. Methods: The Malay adult-report version of the SDQ was administered to 495 parents and 432 teachers, respectively. At the same time, a newly translated Malay child-report version of the SDQ was also administered to 150 children aged 13 to 14 years old in this community study. W e measured internal reliability using Cronbach's Alpha for all reported data. Construct validity of the parent-report data was assessed using factor analysis. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was also subsequently perform on parent-report data to explain the model fit indices of this questionnaire. Result: Cronbach's Alpha was acceptable for all parent, teacher and child-report data with values of 0.74, 0.77 and 0.78, respectively. Factor analysis of the parent's report showed a five-factor solution, which was consistent with other psychometric evaluations of the SDQ in other languages. CFA showed good model fit of the original five factor model which consists of emotional, conduct, hyperactivity, peer problem and pro-social scale. Conclusion: This study shows that the psychometric properties of the Malay parent-report version of the SDQ were similar to other parent-report version of the SDQ questionnaires in other languages, although cross-cultural differences may still exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Emotional and behavioral problems (EBD) or mental health problems in children and adolescents are an important public health issue, but there has been no evaluation to date of the extent of such problems in near-developed countries. This study evaluated the prevalence and stability of EBD among children in Malaysia., Methods: This research comprises a longitudinal population-based study that measured the prevalence and 6-month stability of EBD in children aged seven to eight years and thirteen to fourteen years attending public schools in Malaysia based on parents, teachers and children's (aged 13 to 14 years) report of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) at baseline and 6 months later., Findings: The prevalence of EBD in Malaysian school children was 9.3% for teacher-report, 8.5% for parent-report and 3.9% for child-report. There was no significance difference in the prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems over six-months for all informants, except for teacher-report Emotional and Conduct problems scores which increased significantly and child-report Total Difficulties and Emotional problems scores which decreased significantly (p < 0.05)., Conclusions: This study shows that the prevalence of EBD among Malaysian children is almost similar to the Western countries and stable over a 6-month period. These findings suggest the need for policy makers in near-developed countries to provide services aimed at preventing EBD and treating children identified as having such problems., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.)