The Kids’ Behavior in Context Scales (KICS) II: An Instrument for Detecting Social Contexts Relevant to Youth Interventions

Tailoring psychosocial interventions requires linking youth mental health concerns to the social contexts in which they manifest. We designed the Kids’ Behavior in Context Scales (KICS) to gather data about these social contexts―experiences at school, home, and/or with peers, for example―and their links to youth mental health services. A school-based sample of 173 sixth- to eighth-grade youth, their caregivers, and their teachers each rated social contexts connected to needs for intervention (e.g., aggression, anxiety, inattention) and goals for intervention (e.g., building healthy relationships, relaxation). On the KICS, higher ratings indicate higher contextual stability of youth needs and goals. For each informant, their ratings demonstrated criterion-related validity connected to scores taken from well-established measures of youth psychosocial functioning. Cross-informant agreement on social context ratings was low-to-moderate for needs (average r = .24) and near-zero for goals (average r = .01). These patterns resulted in interpretable structures for discrepant results among informants’ social context ratings for needs but not for goals, and thus, distinct correlations with validity criteria when social context ratings were integrated. Social contexts linked to needs for intervention may be more contextually stable than those related to goals for intervention. The KICS opens doors to using contextual data when tailoring youth mental health services.