The Reliability and Validity of a Child and Adolescent Participation in Decision Making Questionnaire

Background
There is a growing impetus across the research, policy and practice communities for children and young people to participate in decisions that affect their lives. Furthermore, there is a dearth of general instruments that measure children and young people’s views on their participation in decision making. This paper presents the reliability and validity of the Child and Adolescent Participation in Decision Making Questionnaire (CAP-DMQ) and specifically looks at a population of looked-after children where a lack of participation in decision making is an acute issue.
Methods
The participants were 151 looked after children and adolescents between 10-23 years of age who completed the 10 item CAP-DMQ. Of the participants 113 were in receipt of an advocacy service that had an aim of increasing participation in decision-making with the remaining participants not having received this service.
Results
The results showed that the CAP-DMQ had good reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = .94) and showed promising uni-dimensional construct validity through an exploratory factor analysis. The items in the CAP-DMQ also demonstrated good content validity by overlapping with prominent models of child and adolescent participation (Lundy 2007) and decision making (Halpern 2014). A regression analysis showed that age and gender were not significant predictors of CAP-DMQ scores but receipt of advocacy was a significant predictor of scores (effect size d=.88), thus showing appropriate discriminant criterion validity.
Conclusion
Overall, the CAP-DMQ showed good reliability and validity. Therefore, the measure has excellent promise for theoretical investigation in the area of child and adolescent participation in decision making and equally shows empirical promise for use as a measure in evaluating services which have increasing the participation of children and adolescents in decision making as an intended outcome.

What's in the Numbers? Child Welfare Statistics and the Children (NI) Order

This article draws attention to the importance of routinely collected administrative data as an important source for understanding the characteristics of the Northern Ireland child welfare system as it has developed since the Children (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 became its legislative base. The article argues that the availability of such data is a strength of the Northern Ireland child welfare system and urges local politicians, lobbyists, researchers, policy-makers, operational managers, practitioners and service user groups to make more use of them. The main sources of administrative data are identified. Illustration of how these can be used to understand and to ask questions about the system is provided by considering some of the trends since the Children Order was enacted. The “protection” principle of the Children Order provides the focus for the illustration. The statistical trends considered relate to child protection referrals, investigations and registrations and to children and young people looked after under a range of court orders available to ensure their protection and well-being.

Individual differences in speech and language ability profiles in areas of high deprivation

Speech and language ability is not a unitary concept; rather, it is made up of multiple abilities such as grammar, articulation and vocabulary. Young children from socio-economically deprived areas are more likely to experience language difficulties than those living in more affluent areas. However, less is known about individual differences in language difficulties amongst young children from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. The present research examined 172 four-year-old children from socio-economically deprived areas on standardised measures of core language, receptive vocabulary, articulation, information conveyed and grammar. Of the total sample, 26% had difficulty in at least one area of language. While most children with speech and language difficulty had generally low performance in all areas, around one in 10 displayed more uneven language abilities. For example, some children had generally good speech and language ability, but had specific difficulty with grammar. In such cases their difficulty is masked somewhat by good overall performance on language tests but they could still benefit from intervention in a specific area. The analysis also identified a number of typically achieving children who were identified as having borderline speech and language difficulty and should be closely monitored