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Publication, Part of

Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2022 - wave 3 follow up to the 2017 survey

Official statistics, Survey

Page contents

Glossary

Adolescent Psychotic-Like Symptom Screener (APSS)

APSS is designed to assess a variety of psychotic symptoms over the past 12 months. The screener has 7-items with 3 possible response options: 'yes, definitely’, 'maybe' and 'no, never.' Being ‘at-risk’ for psychotic-like experiences was defined as scoring 2 or more out of a possible 7 points.  

Children and young people with a probable mental disorder

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was used to identify children who may have had problems with aspects of their mental health to such an extent that it impacted on their daily lives. These include difficulties with their emotions, behaviour, relationships, hyperactivity, or concentration. Responses from parents, children and young people were used to estimate the likelihood that a child or young person might have a mental disorder, this was classified as either ‘unlikely’, ‘possible’ or ‘probable’.  

The initial MHCYP 2017 report used a different and more detailed diagnostic assessment of mental disorder, the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA), which drew on reports from young people, parents, and teachers and involved clinical consensus rating. Any comparisons between 2017, 2020, 2021 and 2022 must therefore draw on the results presented in this report, which are based on a comparable measure (the SDQ).  

Confidence interval

A measure of the statistical precision of an estimate and shows the range of uncertainty around the calculated estimate. Lower and upper 95% confidence intervals are provided in the Excel data tables. At the 95% confidence level, over many repeats of a survey under the same conditions, one would expect that the confidence interval would contain the true population value 95 times out of 100. Narrower confidence intervals (difference between lower and upper interval) indicate a more precise estimate.  

Statistical significance

The statistical significance of differences noted within the report are determined based on non-overlapping confidence intervals.  


Last edited: 31 January 2023 9:34 am