Materials
Vignettes. As emotional problems (anxiety and depression) affect almost half of those children
aged 5–15 assessed as having a mental health problem in Great Britain (Meltzer, 2007), vignettes
were developed for the study that depicted childhood anxiety and childhood depression and these
were used as the basis for the draw and write exercise and the subsequent group discussion.
Vignettes were based upon DSM-IV diagnostic criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2000),
with each containing the same number of items relating to the difficulty it related to and using
language appropriate for eight year olds. The names of the characters were non-gender specific –
Charlie (‘anxiety’) and Alex (‘depression’). The vignettes were ‘tested’ prior to the focus groups
by 23 trainee clinical psychologists, blind to the difficulty presented in each vignette, who were
asked to indicate anonymously the mental health difficulty depicted. All concurred with the mental
health problem described. Professionals, including two child clinical psychologists and two teach-
ers, were also asked to give feedback on the language and terminology used in the vignettes, the
draw and write instructions and the focus group schedule to ensure they were appropriate for Year
4 children.