Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 generic core scales

The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 (PedsQL™ 4.0) generic core scales.

The standard procedure of cross-culture adaptation was used to develop the Chinese version PedsQL™4.0. We enrolled 1583 healthy children and 1335 pediatric patients (aged from 5 to 18 years) and 325 proxies. The psychometric properties of the measure were evaluated.

The subscales of physical functioning, social functioning and psychosocial showed alpha coefficients above 0.7 for self-report in healthy children and the total pediatric patients, and all coefficients were higher than 0.7 for proxy report for all subscales. There were higher correlations between items and hypothesized subscales than with other subscales. Healthy children reported higher scores than pediatric patients in all subscales. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that some of the indices of goodness of fit did not reach the standard of acceptable construct validity. Moderate to high correlations were found between self-reported and proxy-reported scores.

The Chinese version PedsQL™4.0 has acceptable psychometric properties except the construct validity tested by confirmatory factor analysis and the internal reliability for self-report in pediatric patients with migraine or Gilles and Tourette’s syndrome.