Tasks and skills in youth with problem behaviour. Development of a questionnaire

Abstract

Although in treating adolescents with problem behaviour emphasis is placed on teaching skills of immediate relevance to everyday prosocial functioning, instruments for assessing these skills have been lacking. This article describes the development and preliminary validation of an instrument that enables group care workers to assess skilful behaviour in adolescents in residential treatment facilities: the Adolescents' Tasks and Skills Questionnaire (TASQ). TASQ was constructed using data on 567 adolescents in Dutch residential treatment facilities. TASQ's 29 scales provide insight into specific skills and comprise six wide-ranging competency dimensions. Internal consistency is satisfactory and the preliminary validation study yielded promising results.

Keywords:

• adolescents with problem behaviour
• assessment of skills
• residential treatment facilities
• test construction

Acknowledgements

This project has been conducted within the co-operation of the VU University Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and the Paedological Institute in Amsterdam (currently “De Bascule”). The authors would like to acknowledge gratefully the help of Wendy de Jong-Ward in translating large sections of this article and the helpful comments of Eva-Maria Merz on APA guidelines.