Reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales in adolescents.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 (PedsQL™ 4.0) Generic Core Scales in adolescents


METHODS
After linguistic validation, the Iranian version of the PedsQL™ 4.0 was completed by 848 healthy and 26 chronically ill adolescents aged 13-18 years and their parents.


RESULTS
The internal consistency as measured by Cronbach's alpha coefficients exceeded the minimum reliability standard of .70. No floor effects were observed. Ceiling effects detected ranged from 1.5% for adolescent self-report total scale score to 42.2% for self-report social functioning. All monotrait-multimethod correlations were higher than multitrait-multimethod correlations. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) between adolescent self-report and parent proxy-report showed good to excellent agreement. Exploratory factor analysis supported mainly comparable results with the original US English dialect version. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis for 5-factor models for both self-report and proxy-report indicated acceptable fit for the proposed models. Regarding gender and health status, as hypothesized from previous studies, girls reported lower health-related quality of life than boys on the total score, physical and emotional functioning, and healthy adolescents reported significantly higher health-related quality of life than those with chronic illnesses.


CONCLUSIONS
The findings support the initial reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the PedsQL™ 4.0 as a generic instrument to measure HRQOL of adolescents in Iran.
Amiri
Parisa
P
Obesity Research Center, Research Institute for Endocrine Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, P.O.Box: 19395-4763, Tehran, Iran.
M Ardekani
Emad
E
Jalali-Farahani
Sara
S
Hosseinpanah
Farhad
F
Varni
James W
JW
Ghofranipour
Fazlollah
F
Montazeri
Ali
A
Azizi
Fereidoun
F
D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior; D002908:Chronic Disease / Q000523:psychology; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007492:Iran; D008297:Male; D010290:Parents; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent / Q000295:instrumentation*; D011594:Psychometrics; D011788:Quality of Life; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018434:Sickness Impact Profile; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*