Short Electronic Scale of Child Mental Health Problems - Teacher Report

Due to the lack of electronic scale for screening elementary students based on Iranian culture, this study provides a short online version of the mental health scale-teacher report to increase accuracy and speed of screening and reduce costs of it.

The sample of the study was 22845 students (11545 female, 11300 male) of all provinces of Iran, who filled the long version of the Children's Psychological Health Scale (Akbari Zardkhaneh et al., 2018), including eighty items and eight subscales.

Item analysis with eight criteria showed that almost all items have good features. Factor analysis suggested that an eight-component model with forty items could be considered as a final structure for the short version. Examination of the measurement invariance between the gender groups indicated a suitable fitness that showed this scale assesses the same construct in both gender groups. Internal consistency was sufficiently good and Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the whole scale was 0.97 and for subscales ranged between 0.75-0.93 and 0.80- 0.93, for female and male group respectively. Composite reliability coefficients ranged between 0.70 and 0.93 for girls and between 0.74 and 0.93 for boys. Measurement errors of the scale and subscales showed a suitable range. Standard path coefficients showed a suitable convergent validity of scale. Divergent validity of scale evaluated by average variance extracted and by HTMT method showed the necessary internal consistency and the construct validity within the scale.

This scale is eligible enough to screen primary school students in Iran; however, further evidence is needed.