A Systematic Review of Brief, Child-Completed Adversity Screening Measures

Screening measures are increasingly being recommended to identify children who have experienced adversity, as these experiences are associated with a range of health concerns. However, concerns have been raised that many of these measures are not feasible to use in settings where time is limited or do not have empirical support. Even among screening measures with empirical support deemed to be feasible, there remain significant differences in how adversity is operationalized. This review aimed to identify brief adversity screening measures with psychometric information available and to describe how adversity was operationalized across these measures. Studies were located through eight academic databases, grey literature, and through forward and backwards searching of the reference lists of included studies. Screening, full text review, and data extraction were completed independently by two authors. In total, 42 studies describing 41 measures were located. The most commonly assessed form of adversity was bullying. Additional forms of adversity assessed for included violence exposure, racial and ethnic discrimination, abuse, multiple forms of adversity, childbirth, neglect, and poverty. Though multiple measures have been developed to assess the same form of adversity, measures assessing a common adversity type frequently contained similar items. Currently, many brief child-completed adversity screening measures exist for bullying. More research is needed to develop brief screening measures for other forms of adversity, to screen for multiple types of adversity at once, or to provide empirical support for existing measures.