Factor analysis of child abuse screening tools (CHATR - S) in children aged 3 to 6 years

Abstract

Considering the high prevalence of child abuse in different societies and the need to use authentic local tools to diagnose child abuse and its types among young children in Iranian society, it is necessary to conduct more research in this field. Due to the lack of appropriate and local tools for screening child abuse at a young age in our country, as well as the existence of problems in recognizing child abuse and its types among pediatricians and other professionals who encounter this phenomenon on a daily basis, it is necessary In this field, experimental investigations should be carried out. In this way, the implementation of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of the child abuse screening tool among children will identify the underlying variables of the child abuse structure and confirm its structural validity; Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of determining the construct validity of the child abuse screening tool (CHATR-S) in children aged 3 to 6 years. Materials and Methods: In this research, the child abuse screening tool was used, whose face validity and content have already been checked and confirmed during another thesis (1). In this research, the method of implementing the questionnaires is face-to-face. In this way, the researcher provided the questionnaires to the parents with access to the statistical population, and after they were completed, they were collected. Then, using exploratory factor analysis using the principal components method, the underlying factors of the tool were determined. Then, in order to achieve construct validity among the statistical population and finally to confirm the measurement model, confirmatory factor analysis was used. Also, to check the reliability of the tool, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were calculated. Results: The scores of the content validity ratio (according to Lavshe's method) obtained for all questions of the questionnaire were in the range of 0.7 to 1, which were confirmed; The final number of the content validity index was equal to 0.85, which indicated the acceptable content validity of the entire CHATR-S questionnaire. The KMO index equal to 0.88 was obtained for the whole tool, which shows that the studied sample volume is sufficient to perform the factor analysis. The value of X2 statistic is equal to 95/88 with 42 degrees of freedom. The result of dividing the chi square divided by the degree of freedom (2.28) is less than 3 and also the corresponding significance level is 0.061, which is acceptable considering that it is more than 0.05 and the model is confirmed. Also, all the fit indices were at the optimal level; Cronbach's alpha was equal to 0.93.