Assessing whether measurement invariance of the KIDSCREEN-27 across child-parent dyad depends on the child gender: a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis

Abstract

This study aims to assess the measurement invariance (MI) of the KIDSCREEN-27 questionnaire across girl-parent and boy-parent dyad to clarify how child gender affects the agreement between children's and parents' perception of the meaning of the items in the questionnaire. The child self-reports and parent proxy-reports of the KIDSCREEN-27 were completed by 1061 child-parent dyad. Multiple group categorical confirmatory factor analysis (MGCCFA) was applied to assess MI. The non-invariant items across girl-parent dyad were mostly detected in the psychological well-being and the social support and peers domains. Moreover, the boys and their parents differed mainly in the autonomy and parent relation domain. Detecting different non-invariant items across the girl-parent dyad compared to the boy-parent dyad underlines the importance of taking the child's gender into account when assessing measurement invariance between children and their parents and consequently deciding about children's physical, psychological or social well-being from the parents' viewpoint.