A psychometric analysis of a short form of the Chinese version of the ISPCAN child abuse screening tools – Children’s home version (SC-ICAST-CH) using multidimensional item response theory

Abstract

BackgroundThe development of measures of child maltreatment for the Chinese population were limited until the Chinese version of the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tools – Children’s Home version (ICAST-CH-C) was proposed. Although the ICAST-CH-C was found to be effective in assessing the scope and prevalence of child maltreatment, it has several potential drawbacks. The time that is required to complete the ICAST-CH-C scale is longer than usual for a 36-item scale, because many of its items have one or more follow-up questions. Moreover, each item requires child victims to recall unpleasant experiences. Both phenomena can cause increases in invalid responses and in turn damage the data quality. ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to propose a short form of the ICAST-CH-C (called the SC-ICAST-CH) to reduce the test length and response time in order to improve the measurement quality. Participants and settingA dataset from a national survey of 5236 adolescents in Taiwan was used. MethodsA multidimensional version of the rating scale model (MRSM) was fitted to the data. The model parameters were estimated with the ConQuest software. ResultsThe results indicated the reliability of the SC-ICAST-CH was fairly good, with only 61 % of the original test length. Disordered thresholds were found in all five subscales; the underlying reasons for this phenomenon need further investigation. Specific cultural differences related to item retention/removal decisions were also discussed. ConclusionThe efficient, shorter SC-ICAST-CH was shown to be a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the prevalence of child maltreatment.