Abstract
BackgroundPediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) is a measure to assess health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in children and adolescents. It is formed by 23 items adapted to children age and includes a parent proxy report version. With four multidimensional subscales and three summary scores, it measures health as defined by WHO. The concepts measured by this instrument are ‘physical functioning’ (8 items), ‘emotional functioning’ (5 items), ‘social functioning’ (5 items) and ‘school functioning’ (5 items). It also measures a ‘total scale score’ (23 items), a ‘physical health summary score’ (8 items) and a ‘psychosocial health summary score’ (15 items). The aim of this paper is to present the main results of the cultural adaptation and validation of the PedsQL into European Portuguese.MethodsThe Portuguese version was the result of a forward-backward translation process, with a cognitive debriefing analysis, guaranteeing face validity and semantic equivalence. Children aged 5–7 and 8–12 were randomly selected and were asked to fill a socio-demographic data survey and the Portuguese versions of PedsQL and KINDL, another HRQoL measure for children and adolescents. They were divided into three groups, healthy children, children with type I diabetes and children with spina bifida.The reliability was tested for reproducibility (ICC) and internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha). The construct validity (known-groups discriminant validity) was supported by differences between self-reports from healthy children and children with chronic conditions, and from children with chronic diseases and their parents. The criterion validity was tested after the correlations of the scores obtained by both children and adolescents HRQoL assessment instruments.ResultsA total of 179 children and 97 parents were recruited. PedsQL demonstrated good levels of reproducibility (r > 0.95 in all versions) and acceptable levels of internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha at 0.70 on most scales. Concordance values between children’s and parents’ perceptions ranged between 0.36 and 0.78 and the correlations with KINDL questionnaire were excellent, supporting concurrent validity.ConclusionsThe Portuguese version of the PedsQL demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties for future research and clinical practice for children aged 5–12.
Highlights
With the declining prevalence of acute childhood diseases, the treatment and management of chronic conditions currently constitutes a large proportion of the work performed in the daily medical routine
It is argued that the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) instruments designed to measure and monitor healthcare in children with chronic conditions should be available, accessible and easy to use [4,5], in order to facilitate the assessment of the impact of the disease and treatments, to support daily practice and clinical research [6,7]
Cross-cultural Adaptation Following the opinion of parents and children participating in the panels, PedsQL is seen as a short questionnaire, quick and easy to answer and to understand, useful and suitable for the target population
Summary
With the declining prevalence of acute childhood diseases, the treatment and management of chronic conditions currently constitutes a large proportion of the work performed in the daily medical routine. After the success reached by the design and the use of several HRQoL instruments for adults, a number of generic and disease-specific measures have been developed for use in pediatrics Their availability makes it possible to routinely measure children’s functioning, without imposing long and inadequate questionnaires on them or their parents [8]. Examples of these tools are the KINDL Questionnaire [9], the Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ) [10] and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) [11].
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