A Multimedia Child Developmental Screening Checklist: Design and Validation.

BACKGROUND

Identifying disability early in life confers long-term benefits for children. The Taipei City Child Development Screening tool, second version (Taipei II) provides checklists for 13 child age groups from 4 months to 6 years. However, the usability of a text-based screening tool largely depends on the literacy level and logical reasoning ability of the caregivers, as well as language barriers caused by increasing numbers of immigrants.

OBJECTIVE

The objectives of this study were to (1) design and develop a Web-based multimedia version of the current Taipei II developmental screening tool, and (2) investigate the measurement equivalence of this multimedia version to the original paper-based version.

METHODS

To develop the multimedia version of Taipei II, a team of experts created illustrations, translations, and dubbing of the original checklists. The developmental screening test was administered to a total of 390 primary caregivers of children aged between 4 months and 6 years.

RESULTS

Psychometric testing revealed excellent agreement between the paper and multimedia versions of Taipei II. Good to excellent reliabilities were demonstrated for all age groups for both the cross-mode similarity (mode intraclass correlation range 0.85-0.96) and the test-retest reliability (r=.93). Regarding the usability, the mean score was 4.80 (SD 0.03), indicating that users were satisfied with their multimedia website experience.

CONCLUSIONS

The multimedia tool produced essentially equivalent results to the paper-based tool. In addition, it had numerous advantages, such as it can facilitate active participation and promote early screening of target populations.

CLINICALTRIAL

Clinicaltrials.gov NCT02359591; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02359591 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6l21mmdNn).