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.