A health resources inventory: The development of a measure of the personal and social competence of primary-grade children.

A series of interrelated studies describe the scale development and empirical validation of the Health Resources Inventory (HRI), a teacher measure of primary-grade children's competency-related behavior. Oblique factor analysis of the HRI for matched samples ( N = 298 and N = 294) of 1st-3rd graders yielded comparable solutions, each with 5 internally consistent competence dimensions. Test-retest reliability was .87 for the full scale and ranged from .72 to .91 on individual factor scales. Parametric findings reveal that girls had consistently higher competence scores, county children had significantly higher scores than city children, and there were no consistent grade level differences. Correlations between the HRI and a symptom scale indicate that although competence and pathology are strongly (inversely) related for overall global judgments, competence and pathology are more independent at the level of individual factors. The HRI discriminated between normal and disturbed children, and in a more stringent validity test, sensitively differentiated competence levels within a normative sample. Limitations of the inventory are discussed along with implications for future work.