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To describe and validate the ‘DAWBA bands’. These are novel ordered-categorical measures of child mental health, based on the structured sections of the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA).

We developed computer algorithms to generate parent, teacher, child and multi-informant DAWBA bands for individual disorders and for groups of disorder (e.g. ‘any emotional disorder’). The top two (out of 6) levels of the DAWBA bands were used as computer-generated DAWBA diagnoses. We validated these DAWBA bands in 7,912 British children (7–19 years) and 1,364 Norwegian children (11–13 years), using clinician-rated DAWBA diagnoses as a gold standard.

In general, the prevalence of clinician-rated diagnosis increased monotonically across all levels of the DAWBA bands …