Measuring child and adolescent well-being in Denmark: Validation and norming of the Danish KIDSCREEN-10 child/adolescent version in a national representative sample of school pupils in grades five through eight

• Published in: PloS one 2023-09, Vol.18 (9), p.e0291420-e0291420
• Main Authors: Nielsen, Tine, Pontoppidan, Maiken, Pettersson, Morten, Donstrup, Christina H, Kreiner, Svend, Rayce, Signe Boe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescents; Age groups; Biology and Life Sciences; Child development; Children; Children & youth; Estimates; Evaluation; Gender; Girls; Global health; Health aspects; Language; Mathematical models; Measuring instruments; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mental disorders; Mental health; Modelling; Norms; Parameter estimation; People and Places; Population studies; Psychological aspects; Public health; Public health administration; Quality of life; Quantitative psychology; Questionnaires; Rasch model; Research and Analysis Methods; Social aspects; Social Sciences; Teenagers; Well being; Youth
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291420

KIDSCREEN-10 is a generic instrument for measuring global health-related quality of life among 8-18-year-old children and adolescents. This study examines the criterion-related construct validity and psychometric properties of the Danish language version of the KIDSCREEN-10 using Rasch models. A further aim was to construct Danish norms based on the resulting person parameter estimates from the Rasch models. Data consists of a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of 8171 children in the 5.sup.th to 8.sup.th grade of primary school in Denmark. No adequate fit to the Rasch model or a graphical loglinear Rasch model could be established for the KIDSCREEN-10 in the full sample of children (n = 8171). Results based on analyses with increasing samples sizes showed that even with the smallest sample item 3 (Kid3) of the KIDSCREEN-10 did not fit the Rasch model. After elimination of Kid3, substantial local dependence and differential item functioning relative to gender and grade level was still present. Already with a sample size of 630 fit to the Rasch model or a graphical loglinear Rasch model adjusting for local dependence and differential item functioning was not established. Therefore, generation of Danish norms was not realizable, as this requires valid sum scores and estimates of the person parameters for an adequate number of cases. Thus, the Danish language version of the child/adolescent self-report KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire cannot be recommended for use in population-level studies. Neither can use in small sample be recommended as adjustment for differential item functioning and local dependence is ambiguous.