AITANA researchers have developed a brief questionnaire to assess mood in children. The Brief Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ) is one of the few well-established measures for assessing childhood depression. The paper, published in Psicothema, evaluates the psychometric properties and explores the differential item functioning (DIF) of the SMFQ in a community sample of Spanish children. The results of the study conclude that the SMFQ has good internal consistency. The test-retest analysis confirms its temporal stability. The SMFQ is a useful instrument for clinicians who need to assess the severity of depressive symptoms. The questionnaire is brief, reliable, and valid for the assessment of depressive symptoms in Spanish children.
New scale for rapid assessment of depressive symptoms in children
