Assessing strengths and difficulties in social development: a comparison of the Social Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM) with two established developmental psychopathological questionnaires

In both basic research and applied domains, the prevailing paradigm for assessing social development has shifted from deficit-oriented measures to strength-based assessments or a combination. However, it is not yet clear the extent to which strength-based assessment reflects one end of a single dimension of children’s socio-emotional skills, or a distinctly different dimension from a problem-focused examination. This validation study compares the Social Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM) with two well-known psychopathological questionnaires (the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form; C-TRF and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire; SDQ-T. We explore the relations between and the variation of the three questionnaires’ scores based on a low-risk sample of 2−5-year-old Danish children (n = 291). The SEAM Empathy Index is directly and positively related to the SDQ-T Prosocial subscale, while the SEAM Self-regulation & Cooperation Index is directly and negatively related to the SDQ-T Conduct problems subscale and the C-TRF Aggressive behaviour and Attention problems subscales. The variation in the SEAM indexes at the floor of the problem-based scales appears to reflect that strength-based assessments measure a distinct aspect of behaviour that is not identical to absence of problem-based behaviour. Thus, positive and negative aspects of socio-emotional skills are not entirely on the same dimension, and strength-based assessment improves the range of information.