The Life Skills Assessment Scale: Measuring Life Skills of Disadvantaged Children in the Developing World

Abstract

Adversity, including malnutrition, has had irrefutable effects on child development and mental health. India, for example, has approximately 160 million children in poverty: The growth of up to 59% of rural and 48% of all children is stunted. Hundreds of thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) work with these disadvantaged children to increase their life skills and ameliorate effects of adversity. Yet a simple effective measure of program impact has remained elusive. We used observational data from 1,136 disadvantaged children aged 8 to 16 years to construct a simple 5-item impact assessment scale. Although the scale was developed in India, we envisage that it could be used with disadvantaged children worldwide.