The Development and Psychometric Properties of the Children's Sleep Assessment Questionnaire in Taiwan

Abstract

To develop and examine the validity and reliability of the Children's Sleep Assessment Questionnaire (CSAQ) for school-aged children in Taiwan.

Design and methods: We used a cross-sectional study design with stratified random sampling. Pairs of children and parents were recruited from a school-based sample of third- and fourth-grade students, enrolling 362 child and parent pairs. The content validity, construct validity, convergent validity, internal consistency, and inter-rater reliability of the CSAQ were assessed.

Results: The CSAQ comprised three parts: sleep hygiene, sleep quality, and sleep disturbance. Sleep hygiene showed a moderate intra-class correlation coefficient (0.37-0.66) between children and parents. Results of exploratory factor analysis suggested a four-factor structure model for sleep quality with 64.9% of variance and a two-factor structure for sleep disturbance with 57.7% of variance. These two models also demonstrated good fit with the confirmatory factor analysis.

Conclusions: The CSAQ is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing sleep problems in school-aged children.

Practice implications: Both clinicians and researchers can use the CSAQ to screen or elucidate the children' sleep problems.

Keywords: Children's sleep assessment questionnaire; School-aged child; Sleep problems.