Child abuse scale: development, reliability and validity

Abstract

Objective To develop a new scale as an assessment instrument for assessing the abuse status of child.To examine the reliability and validity of the child abuse scale(CAS).Methods Considering the cultural background of China,an item pool was established through revising items in correlative literatures and scales.Then,the first draft of the CAS was developed by reserving effective items which were graded by interrelated experts.The sample consisted of 871 students of the junior high school and the technology and profession college.Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to develop and evaluate the structure of the scale.Results The CAS consisted of 35 items.The CAS was made of three sections which were physical abuse scale,verbal abuse scale and sexual abuse scale.The results of reliability were as follows:the eronhach's Alpha reliability of the whole child abuse scale was 0.87,and the test-retest reliability was 0.88.The item loadiugs of the abuse scale was 0.33～0.74.The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the ratio of Chi-square to degrees of freedom was 3.81,the goodness of fit index was 0.91,the Tucker-Lewis index was 0.89,and the root mean square error of approximation was 0.04.Criterion-related validity studies showed that the scores of the CAS were significantly correlative with the rearing styles of their parents and child personality as well.Conclusion The internal consistency,test-retest reliability,content validity,construct validity,and criterion-related validity of the CAS entirely accorded with psychometric demands. Key words: Mental health; Cross-sectional; Survey; Development reliability; Validity