Citation

Feng JY, Chen CC, Chang YT, Chang HY, Shih CL. Child Abuse Negl. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104693

PMID

32994039

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The 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.

OBJECTIVE: The 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 SETTING: A dataset from a national survey of 5236 adolescents in Taiwan was used.

METHODS: A multidimensional version of the rating scale model (MRSM) was fitted to the data. The model parameters were estimated with the ConQuest software.

RESULTS: The 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.

CONCLUSION: The efficient, shorter SC-ICAST-CH was shown to be a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the prevalence of child maltreatment.

Language: en

Keywords

Child maltreatment; Cultural difference; Disordered thresholds; Multidimensional item response theory