Optimal cutoff value of the Japanese shortened version of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) youth self-report

The Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) is a brief questionnaire aimed at detecting psychosocial problems of children and adolescents for intervention in the early stage. Though we have devised a 17-item version of the PSC-Youth Self-Report (PSC-17-Y) Japanese version, our subsequent goal was to evaluate its adequacy by comparing the scores of patients and of schoolchildren for the prevention and early intervention of schoolchildren’s psychosocial problems. This study was conducted in Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, between July 2020 and September 2022, during which participants completed the Japanese version of the PSC-17-Y (JPSC-17-Y). The participants were 52 patients with psychosocial problems (23 boys and 29 girls; mean age, 13.6 years) and 64 age-matched schoolchildren (24 boys and 40 girls; mean age, 13.4 years). The total score and each factor score of the JPSC-17-Y were compared, with the Mann-Whitney U test used to examine the differences between the groups. The results showed that the patient group’s scores were significantly higher than the control group’s for all factors and the total score. To estimate the cutoff value for differentiating between the control group and the patient group using the total score of the JPSC-17-Y, the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve was calculated. The AUC was 0.755, indicating a moderate level of predictive performance for the JPSC-17-Y. The cutoff value of the total score between 12 and 13 was considered clinically appropriate. These findings suggest that the JPSC-17-Y can lead to prevention of and early intervention for psychosocial problems of schoolchildren.