Preschool mental health: The Brief Child and Family Intake and Outcomes System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the availability of effective early interventions, few preschoolers with mental health issues receive these services. This situation exists partly due to challenges in the identification of emotional and behavioral issues in young children. We developed the Brief Child and Family Intake and Outcomes System for Preschoolers, which is a 60-item standardized online parent questionnaire including three externalizing scales (Regulating Attention, Impulsivity, and Activity; Cooperating; Regulating Conduct), five internalizing scales (Separating from Parents; Managing Anxiety; Managing Social Anxiety; Regulating Compulsive Behaviour; Managing Mood), and two regulating states scales (Eating; Sleeping). We conducted a normative study of 1,200 Canadian children 3–5 years old, stratified by sex, age, geographic region, and parents’ marital status, income, and education. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated good model fit, and the relationship between items and scales did not vary significantly between boys and girls or among 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Reliability estimates indicated high internal consistency and 2-month test–retest reliability for a subsample (n = 100) ranging from .44 to .73. Providing preliminary evidence of validity, scale scores had positive relations with measures of child functioning challenges, family distress, caregiver mood, and demographic risk variables. We extend earlier work by including clinically relevant emotional-behavioral scales while at the same time minimizing respondent burden and providing norms for Canadian preschoolers. The questionnaire could be used in children’s mental health settings, primary care, child welfare, and day-care and school facilities, for intake, triage, and describing 3- to 5-year-old children.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".