"Survey of Wellbeing of Young Children (SWYC)": how does it fit for screening developmental delay in Brazilian children aged 4 to 58 months?
Brazilian kids pass SWYC milestones later than U.S. norms after age three, so use local cutoffs to avoid false red flags.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers translated the Survey of Wellbeing of Young Children (SWYC) into Brazilian Portuguese. They gave the milestone checklist to parents of kids aged 4 to 58 months. Then they checked if the scores were reliable and if the tool still flagged the same kids who needed help.
What they found
The Brazilian SWYC worked. It gave steady scores when parents filled it out twice. It also pointed to the same children that doctors already worried about. After 36 months, though, Brazilian children looked "delayed" when judged by U.S. norms. The gap was big enough that a different cutoff is needed.
How this fits with other research
Heo et al. (2008) did the same kind of job in Korea with the ASQ. They also saw good reliability and later milestone timing, backing up the idea that culture shifts the calendar.
Pérez-García et al. (2017) compared Spanish and U.S. CBCL raw scores. Raw totals made Spanish kids look worse, but country-based T-scores wiped the gap out. The lesson is the same: use local norms, not foreign ones.
Leung et al. (2014) ran M-CHAT/ASQ screens in mostly Hispanic U.S. clinics and got positive rates near 30%. That high rate makes sense once you know that culture and language can push scores up.
Why it matters
If you screen with the SWYC in Portuguese, keep the Brazilian cutoffs handy. After age three, a child who seems behind by U.S. charts may be typical locally. Using the wrong table risks over-referral and wasted hours. Always ask: "Whose normal am I using?" Then pick the norm that matches the family in front of you.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVE: To replicate the original normative study of the SWYC's Milestones Questionnaires for children in Brazil. Our goals were to compare the performance of Brazilian and North American children using this screening tool and to verify the reliability and validity of the Brazilian version. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: Cross-sectional study with children aged 1-65 months and their guardians, recruited in southern Brazil. Parents were interviewed using the Developmental Milestones questionnaire, which contains 10 questions about cognitive, motor, social, and language abilities. Item response theory was used to examine item validity. RESULTS: We interviewed 415 parents. SWYC provided the most information on the children's development between 10 and 30 months. The performance of Brazilian and North American children was quite similar when children are younger than 36 months old. Above 36 months, North American children performed almost all items earlier than Brazilians. Convergent validity was 0.73 and internal consistency 0.97. CONCLUSION: The Brazilian version of the Developmental Milestones questionnaire presented acceptable measurement qualities that support the SWYĆs potential as a developmental screening tool. As we found important differences between North American and Brazilian children in achieving the milestones, especially among the oldest children, additional normative studies are needed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2018 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.05.003