Children and adolescents with mental health concerns often present in schools or primary care settings where adults are tasked with screening students for mental illness. Several limitations to assessment exist, including test licensing fees, few qualified mental health professionals, and limited access to valid adolescent-specific questionnaires (Lamoureux et al., 2021).
MyHEARTSMAP is an online psychological screening tool designed to assess four domains: psychiatry, function, social, and youth health. Upon completion of the test, invigilators are provided with domain specific severity ratings ranging from ‘no concern’ to ‘severe concern’, and personalized mental health recommendations are produced based on client responses. The easily interpretation of the test suggests suitability for youth in school and primary care settings, therefore Lamoureux et al. investigated the convergent validity of MyHEARTSMAP against two current pediatric mental health questionnaires, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and Pediatric Quality of Life (PedsQL).
Results indicated a strong and significant correlation between MyHEARTSMAP and PedsQL in the domains of psychiatry and function, and a very strong correlation between MyHEARTSMAP and SDQ in the psychiatry domain. The social domain in MyHEARTSMAP had a low convergent validity with both PedsQL and SDQ, suggesting improvements must be made to these questions before full implementation of the assessment. The mental illness severity scores found in MyHEARTSMAP were comparable to the PedsQL and SDQ, and results indicated that MyHEARTSMAP may be more sensitive to subthreshold or emerging mental health concerns than current assessments.
Citation:
Lamoureux, E., Ishikawa, T., Yeates, K. O., Brooks, B. L., Beauchamp, M. H., Craig, W., Gravel, J., Zemek, R., & Doan, Q. (2021). Convergent validity of myheartsmap: A pediatric psychosocial health screening tool. Child Psychiatry and Human Development. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1007/s10578-021-01221-7
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