[Studies of the norm and psychometric properties of Ages and Stages Questionnaires in Shanghai children].

Objective: To introduce the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) to China, we created ASQ-Chinese (ASQ-C) and carried out studies of its norm and the psychometrical properties in Shanghai children aged 3-66 months in collaboration with the author of the ASQ with the permissions from the publisher.

Method: The 19 ASQ intervals were translated into Chinese, to make the ASQ-C culturally relevant, and back translated into English. The project used a stratified cluster sampling method and recruited children aged 3 - 66 months with respect to demographic characteristics that were representative of Shanghai census data, and excluded the children whose mother tongue was not Chinese and/or diagnosed with disabilities by the authoritative hospitals in Shanghai. Parents/caregivers of the 8472 children either independently completed the age-appropriate ASQ-Cs or completed with help from the researchers for the normative samples. Among them, professionals completed the age-appropriate ASQ-C again for 519 children within six days after the parents/caregivers completed the ASQ-C for inter-rater reliability. In terms of test-retest reliability, 651 parents completed another age-appropriate questionnaires within a 10- to 23-day interval. For concurrent validity, BSIDII were administered with 255 children from 6, 12, 18, 24, and 30-month ASQ-C age intervals. The cutoffs of the ASQ-C and the BSIDII were all set at the two standard deviations below the means. The statistical analysis was carried out using SPSS 13.0.

Result: The ASQ-Cs were independently completed by 85.25% of the parents/caregivers; the percentage of gender, family income and region of residence were similar to the Shanghai population census conducted in the recent years. Two standard deviations below the means were used as the cutoff scores of the ASQ-Cs across the age intervals. In terms of internal consistency of the ASQ-C, Cronbach standardized alpha was 0.77. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the ASQ-C total scores of the two testers was 0.84 (P < 0.0001). The Pearson correlation coefficient between the ASQ-C total scores of the two tests was 0.82 (P < 0.0001). The percentage of the agreement between the ASQ-C and the BSID II was 84.31%, the sensitivity of ASQ-C was 85.00%, and the specificity of ASQ-C was 84.26%.

Conclusion: It is practicable that the ASQ-C can be completed by the parents/caregivers of Shanghai children. ASQ-C has solid psychometric properties and is worthy of further research and introduction to China.