Evaluating Social Participation of Pupils with Special Needs in Regular Primary Schools: Examination of a Teacher Questionnaire

The study addresses the psychometric qualities of a new teacher questionnaire, the Social Participation Questionnaire (SPQ), to assess the social participation of pupils with special needs in regular primary education. The SPQ initially consisted of 34 statements related to four key themes of social participation: "friendships/relationships," "contacts/interactions," "pupil's social self-perception," and "acceptance by classmates," yielding four respective subscales. A nonparametric item response analysis (Mokken scale analysis) was used to examine the quality of the SPQ. Based on the Mokken scale analysis results, ten statements were removed. The resulting four subscales appeared intermediate to strong. Because the double monotonicity model, based on the Mokken scale analysis, turned out to be well-fitted for each subscale, the subscale scores are on an ordinal scale, and the separate statements are invariantly ordered. The subscale scores are comparable across pupils with and without special needs, differential item functioning appearing to be absent. Subsequent analyses supported the division of statements into the four subscales. The SPQ as a whole and its subscales were found to be reliable. Finally, as regards social participation, differences between pupils with and without special needs were clearly found.