Counting what counts: A systematic scoping review of instruments used in primary healthcare services to measure the wellbeing of Indigenous children and youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Primary healthcare services have principal responsibility for providing child and youth wellbeing and mental health services, but they have lacked appropriate measurement instruments to assess the wellbeing of Indigenous children and youth or to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and health service initiatives designed to address their needs. This literature review was conceived and conducted to respond to this identified need by assessing the availability and characteristics of measurement instruments that have been applied in primary healthcare services in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the United States (CANNZUS countries) to assess the wellbeing of Indigenous children and youth. Wellbeing was defined as a relational phenomenon encompassing individual, collective, cultural and spiritual domains. Method 15 databases and 12 websites were searched in December 2017 and again in October 2021. Pre-defined search terms pertained to Indigenous children and youth, CANNZUS country names, wellbeing measurement, and primary healthcare services. PRISMA guidelines were followed, with eligibility criteria guiding screening of titles and abstracts, and selected full-text papers. Documented measurement instruments were then categorised according to four criteria that were deemed most likely to represent Indigenous child and youth experiences of wellbeing: adherence to relational strength-based constructs of Indigenous wellbeing, development for Indigenous populations, administration by child/youth self-report, and reliability and validity. Results 17 publications (nine studies) were found, that described the development and/or use by primary healthcare services of 14 measurement instruments, employed across 27 applications. Four/14 measurement instruments focused solely on strength-based wellbeing concepts but none included all Indigenous wellbeing domains, four were developed specifically for Indigenous populations, six were administered through child/youth self-report, and 11 were reliable and valid. Discussion The measurement instrument that most closely adhered to our desirability criteria was the Canadian Aboriginal Children’s Health and Well-Being Measure (ACHWM). Other measurement instruments rated with 2–3 desirability criteria were the Children’s Global Assessment Scale (C-GAS), Outcome Rating Scale (ORS), Session Rating Scale (SRS), Strong Souls, Westerman Aboriginal Symptoms Checklist Youth (WASC-Y) and the YouthCHAT. This review supports several Australian research studies that are currently underway to develop measures/ screening tools to assess the wellbeing of Indigenous adolescents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.190 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.037 | 0.035 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".