Measures of Social Functioning Applicable to Children

Abstract

<p>This thesis describes the development and preliminary assessment of social function measures applicable to noninstitutionalized children ranging from 2-14 years of age. The measures are to be used in a cohort comparison study to evaluate neonatal intensive care for under 1500 gram birth weight infants. A lack of earlier attempts to develop measures that focus specifically on the social health of children provided the motivation for creating the scales reported in this paper.</p> <p>The three major divisions of the thesis include a discussion of measurement criteria applicable to new child health scales; a content analysis and evaluation of available measures of social functioning; and the analysis of results from a pilot study designed to assess a battery of instruments created for the neonatal intensive care project.</p> <p>Emerging from this work are three social function scales. One of the scales assesses the quality of social relationships and applies to children from 2-14 years. Pilot study results suggest, however, that this scale may overlap excessively with measures of emotional function. The remaining social function scales are applicable to children from 4-14 years: they measure quantitative dimensions of social health which include friendships, interpersonal contacts and social activities.</p>