Internalizing problems before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in independent samples of Dutch children and adolescents with and without pre-existing mental health problems
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Abstract
The aim of the study was to assess internalizing problems before and during the pandemic with data from Dutch consortium Child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, consisting of two Dutch general population samples (GS) and two clinical samples (CS) referred to youth/psychiatric care. Measures of internalizing problems were obtained from ongoing data collections pre-pandemic ( N GS = 35,357; N CS = 4487) and twice during the pandemic, in Apr–May 2020 ( N GS = 3938; clinical: N CS = 1008) and in Nov–Dec 2020 ( N GS = 1489; N CS = 1536), in children and adolescents (8–18 years) with parent (Brief Problem Monitor) and/or child reports (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System ® ). Results show that, in the general population, internalizing problems were higher during the first peak of the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic based on both child and parent reports. Yet, over the course of the pandemic, on both child and parent reports, similar or lower levels of internalizing problems were observed. Children in the clinical population reported more internalizing symptoms over the course of the pandemic while parents did not report differences in internalizing symptoms from pre-pandemic to the first peak of the pandemic nor over the course of the pandemic. Overall, the findings indicate that children and adolescents of both the general and clinical population were affected negatively by the pandemic in terms of their internalizing problems. Attention is therefore warranted to investigate long-term effects and to monitor if internalizing problems return to pre-pandemic levels or if they remain elevated post-pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.05.21264160: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: Prior to the start of the study, collaborating parties received approval for data collection by the appropriate ethics committees, and all children and parents provided informed consent.
Consent: Prior to the start of the study, collaborating parties received approval for data collection by the appropriate ethics committees, and all children and parents provided informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization If a participant had participated on more than one of the three measurements, inclusion of only one of the respective measurements was determined with randomization, to maintain independent samples. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.05.21264160: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: Prior to the start of the study, collaborating parties received approval for data collection by the appropriate ethics committees, and all children and parents provided informed consent.
Consent: Prior to the start of the study, collaborating parties received approval for data collection by the appropriate ethics committees, and all children and parents provided informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization If a participant had participated on more than one of the three measurements, inclusion of only one of the respective measurements was determined with randomization, to maintain independent samples. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Some limitations of the present study need to be addressed. Firstly, there were no measurements on child reports (PROMIS) for the clinical population before the pandemic, and as such no inferences can be made of how great the initial impact of the pandemic was as experienced by children in youth/psychiatric care. Moreover, none of the samples had collected data at all measurements on both parent- and child reports, and furthermore representativeness of the samples was not checked except for the child reports in the general population (KLIK). Families participating in the NTR generally show high socioeconomic status [16], which may have resulted in a slight overestimation of differences between clinical and population samples, in line with literature showing that children and adolescents of families with higher socioeconomic status experienced fewer emotional and behavioral problems in stressful life situations [36]. However, since we compared internalizing problems at the various time points for each sample separately, not controlling for sociodemographic differences may first and foremost only have impacted generalizability. Furthermore, the mean age of children in the pre-pandemic and especially pandemic sample of the NTR is lower (childhood age range) than the mean age of the other samples (adolescent age range). In line with literature indicating that the COVID-19 pandemic may have especially perpetuated adolescents’ internalizing problems [23, 37], the NTR sample in our ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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