Optimal cutoff value of the Japanese shortened version of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) Youth Self-Report

Background The Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) is a brief questionnaire aimed at detecting psychosocial problems of children and adolescents for intervention in early stage. Despite we have devised the 17-item version of the PSC-Youth Self-Report (PSC-17-Y) Japanese version, our subsequent goal is to ascertain its sufficiency through a comparative assessment of the scores between patients and schoolchildren for prevention and early intervention of psychosocial problems with schoolchildren. Methods The subjects were 52 patients with psychosocial problems (23 boys and 29 girls; mean age, 13.6 years) and 64 age-matched schoolchildren (24 boys and 40 girls; mean age, 13.4 years). We compared the total score and each factor score of the Japanese version of the PSC-17-Y. Results The Mann-Whitney U test was then applied to examine the differences between the groups, and the results showed that the patient group was significantly higher than the control group in the all factors and the total score. The cutoff value of the total score between 12 and 13 was considered clinically appropriate. Conclusions These findings supported that the Japanese version of the PSC-17-Y leads to prevention and early intervention of psychosocial problems with schoolchildren.