Health-Related Quality of Life in Portuguese Children and Adolescents

The KIDSCREEN is a European cross-cultural and standardized instrument that assesses ten quality of life dimensions in children, adolescents and their parents. This instrument is used to validate evidences to support general inferences on quality-of-life measures obtained by the Portuguese version of KIDSCREEN-10 for children and adolescents, in the context of a survey research carried on in Portugal. The present study focuses only on the KIDSCREEN children and adolescents' versions. A sample of 8072 Portuguese children and adolescents attending the 5th grade (19.3%), 6th grade (19.2%), 7th grade (20.3%), 8th (21.6%) and 10th grade (19.7%) in Portuguese schools were inquired, with a mean age of 13.2; SD 2.06, randomly distributed regarding gender. The Portuguese version of KIDSCREEN-10 instrument showed a good Internal Consistency of.78. Chosen fit indexes indicate good fit to the data. Specifically in the final solution the RMSEA was lower than .03 and the upper limit of 90% confidence interval was lower than .05, and CFI was higher than .95. Results indicated that the current 10-item structure is invariant across age groups, nationality and socio-economic level. The KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire is a reliable instrument to estimate the perception of quality of life in children and adolescents. Psychometric guidelines are presented for the Portuguese population aged 10 to 16 years old.