Children’s Social Understanding Scale-Short Form: Adaptation to Turkish Sample

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: The Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) assesses young children’s theory of mind (ToM). The current study adapted the parent version of the CSUS-short form to Turkish and examined its utility, for the first time, as an assessment tool for teachers. The associations of parent and teacher reports of the CSUS-short form with classical behavioral assessments of ToM were investigated along with such known correlates of ToM as receptive language, executive functions (EF), and social competence. Two hundred and two children (M_age = 53.98 months), their parents and 169 teachers participated in the study at Time 1, and one year later at Time 2, 132 parents and 109 teachers completed the CSUS-short form again. Similar to the original version of the scale, both parent and teacher forms yielded one-factor structure, demonstrated high internal consistencies at both measurement points, and were positively correlated with each other across time. Parent and teacher forms were also concurrently and positively associated with behavioral ToM tasks, receptive language, EF, and social competence. Practice or Policy: These results pointed to the reliability and validity of the parent and teacher versions of the CSUS-short form as a multi-informant measure for Turkish preschoolers and lay the ground for cross-cultural comparison of children’s ToM scores with the other cultural adaptions of the CSUS.

Acknowledgments

We thank Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities of Koç University for supporting this research. Also we would like to acknowledge the efforts of all undergraduate students who helped data collection process of the current study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. In our sample, the number of missing values was low with 25, 16 and 11 of the 202 parents, missing one, two or three items (respectively), while 42, 38 and 14 of the 169 teachers had one, two or three items missing (respectively).

2. When examined separately, social competence ratings of parents were significantly linked with CSUS ratings of parents (r = .63, p < .001) and teachers (r = .36, p < .001). Likewise, social competence ratings of teachers were significantly correlated with CSUS ratings of parents (r = .24, p < .001) and teachers (r = .62, p < .001).

3. The statistical significance levels of the standardized beta coefficients were the same when age and gender were accounted for in the regression analyses.

Additional information

Funding

The data for the article were drawn from a larger project funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) 111K404 (PI: Bilge Selçuk Yağmurlu).