Early screening for protective and risk factors : Polish adaptation of the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment

There is a lack of Polish-language assessment instruments measuring resilience in preschool children. One of the most comprehensive instruments is the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA): a parent- or teacher-report instrument that measures children's protective and risk factors. It is used to guide resilience training, and to screen for behavioral problems. We validated the Polish adaptation of DECA among parents and teachers of 526 preschool children aged 2-5 years. The DECA scale showed very good internal reliability with Cronbach's ɑs in the  .76-.94 range and decent criterion validity, in terms of correlations with the the Emotionality Activity and Sociability Scale for Children, Locus of Control Scale in Preschoolers and Social Development Scales. A confirmatory factor analysis of the three-factor model with weighted least square mean and variance adjusted estimation yielded satisfactory fit. Results thus indicate that the Polish version of the DECA scale may be used to assess resilience in children.