EVALUATING A 10 QUESTIONS SCREEN FOR CHILDHOOD DISABILITY - RELIABILITY AND INTERNAL STRUCTURE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES

This paper uses five strategies to evaluate the reliability and other measurement qualities of the Ten Questions screen for childhood disabi lity. The screen was administered for 22,125 children, aged 2-9 years, in Bangladesh, Jamaica and Pakistan. The test-retest approach involvi ng small sub-samples was useful for assessing reliability of overall s creening results, but not of individual items with low prevalence. Alt ernative strategies focus on the internal consistency and structure of the screen as well as item analyses. They provide evidence of similar and comparable qualities of measurement in the three culturally diver gent populations, indicating that the screen is likely to produce comp arable data across cultures. One of the questions, however, correlates with the other questions differently in Jamaica, where it appears to ''over-identify'' children as seriously disabled. The methods and find ings reported here have general applications for the design and evalua tion of questionnaires for: epidemiologic research, particularly when the goal is to gather comparable data in geographically and culturally diverse settings.