Comparing two school-based methods for identifying behavioral and emotional risk in youth : traditional identification practices and self-report universal screening

Traditional identification methods in schools for determining students at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders tend to rely on teacher referral. There is evidence that systematic approaches to screening for emotional and behavioral risk more effectively capture the full range of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and are less vulnerable to biases. The proposed study seeks to compare traditional identification methods for identifying youth with elevated behavioral and emotional risk (BER) with a self-report universal screening procedure in a school setting. The study will explore discrepancies between the two identification methods, including the degree to which they agree/disagree on “at risk” students, the racial/ethnic, socioeconomic status (SES), and language characteristics of identified students, and the presenting symptoms of students identified via the two methods. It is hypothesized that the two identification methods will frequently disagree on the risk status of individual students and that patterns based on racial/ethnic background, SES, language status, and symptom presentation will emerge. Data will analyzed using chi-squared goodness of fit, one-way repeated measures ANOVA, and Cohen’s kappa coefficient