Content validity of a structured tool: knowledge questionnaire on behavioural problems

Background: Children can have different types of behavioural problems, i.e. inattention, restlessness, anxiety, sadness, fearfulness, lying, stealing, etc., which may lead to development of mental disorder if neglected at its early stage. The prevailing status of mental health problems among children requires early identification and management where school teachers can take an active role in a poor health resource country like India. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to assess the knowledge of school teachers on behavioural problems of children. Review of literature helps in constructing the tool for knowledge assessment which requires validity and reliability testing. This study aims at evaluating content validity of such a structured tool developed to assess the knowledge of school teachers on behavioural problems. Method: The structured knowledge questionnaire consists of 30 items. It has four domains of behavioural problems, i.e. meaning, causes, characteristics, and management of behavioural problems. The questionnaire is given to 18 number of experts from the fields of psychiatry, psychiatric nursing, clinical psychology, counseling psychology, education, sociology, social and preventive medicine, and biostatistics for their valuable input and experts are requested to complete within one month. Result: The content validity of the knowledge questionnaire is found to be excellent both at item level and scale level (I-CVI≥0.78 and S-CVI=0.99). This suggests that the structured knowledge questionnaire shows acceptable validity. Conclusion: The testing of validity of a structured questionnaire is very important in social and health science research as it gives confidence to readers about the tool. In addition, it is also mandatory to check the reliability of the tool which can be done in the future for the present study.