The validity and reliability of preschool age psychiatric assessment (PAPA) in Turkish population

Introduction: The Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA) was developed in response to the need for a standard and reliable tool for assessing preschool-age psychiatric disorders. The aim of this study was to translate PAPA into the Turkish language and evaluate the validity and reliability.

Methods: The researchers translated the original PAPA to Turkish, and the Turkish version of PAPA was translated back into its original language by professional translators. After the psychiatric assessment of the 300 patients by child psychiatrist, the PAPA interview was implemented with the parents. The sociodemographic data form and the PAPA short forms were filled out by the clinician conducting the interview. The Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 1.5-5 (CBCL/1½-5) was completed by parents.

Results: The rate of detecting true positives and true negatives in all subscales when comparing PAPA with CBCL in children under 60 months ranged from 65% to 88%. The AUC values were above 50%, ranging from 0.56 to 0.72, indicating that PAPA performed reasonably well in detecting true positives and true negatives compared to CBCL. According to DC: 0-5, it was found that the adjustment was good for total psychopathologies, separation anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and depression (κ = 0.67-0.79), and excellent for GAD and PTSD (κ = 0.81-1.00) CONCLUSION: The validity and reliability obtained from this study are valuable in our country for the objective identification of preschool children showing problematic symptom levels and for distinguishing them from children showing typical characteristics.