Validating the Teacher Version of Pediatric Symptom Checklist–17 in Chinese Elementary Schools.

This article focuses on the translation, cultural adaptation, and psychometric validation of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist–17 (PSC-17), a brief screening tool originally developed in the United States to assess children's emotional, attentional, and behavioral problems, for use as a teacher-report measure in Chinese elementary schools. Following a rigorous translation process involving bilingual experts and consultations with Chinese elementary teachers and mental health professionals, the study confirmed the scale's content validity and identified a unidimensional factor structure as optimal for this cultural context. The adapted PSC-17 demonstrated high reliability and strong criterion validity through correlations with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and an empirically derived cut-off score of 17 was recommended for identifying children at psychosocial risk, slightly higher than the original cut-off of 15. The findings support the PSC-17 as a culturally appropriate, efficient screening instrument for early identification of psychosocial problems in Chinese school settings, while noting limitations related to sample generalizability and the use of teacher referrals as the criterion standard.