Poster #55 - How I Feel About My School (HIFAMS) for Chinese Children: Reliability, Validation and Measurement Invariance

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Background Children spend lots of time at school and learn knowledge and acquire necessary skills via interacting with teachers and peers, which is crucial for children’s development and health. We, therefore, need to have a reliable and valid measure which could be used in schools to assess how children feel about their school. Such a scale could be applied to inform clinical practice and school development plans as well as in research. However, to our knowledge, there are no reliable and valid measures in China. How I Feel About My School (HIFAMS) questionnaire was developed as a measure of school wellbeing for younger children (i.e., 4-8 years old; Allen et al., 2018), and it has been translated into three languages (https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/hifams/#a0). The current study aims to formally assess the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of HIFAMS in assessing children’s perceptions of their happiness in school.
Methods For the first visit, 1315 children (M age = 9.89; SD age = 1.73; 54.3% boys) from 1st Grade to 6th Grade were recruited to answer the Chinese version of How I feel about my school (HIFAMS-C). After 2 weeks, 433 children (M age = 9.93; SD age = 1.76; 55.4% boys) answered HIFAMS-C again. Besides, 1244 parents answered the parent version of HIFAMS-C and the Chinese version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Also, 42 teachers filled the teacher version of HIFAMS-C, and teachers rated 1350 children’s performance in school.
Results HIFAMS-C demonstrated good internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha=.80), and its test-retest reliability was good (intraclass correlation coefficient=0.83). HIFAMS-C demonstrated a single-factor structure which was supported by good model fits of Confirmatory Factor Analysis [CFA; Chi-Square value = 64.12, degree of freedom =15, p-value <.001; CFI =.99; TLI =.98; RMSEA =.05, 90% C.I. (.04-.07)]. Furthermore, multigroup CFA revealed evidence for the configural, metric, threshold and residual variance invariance of the HIFAMS-C across gender (Table 1), which supported gender measurement invariance of HIFAMS-C. There are low correlations between scores on the child-reported HIFAMS-C and parent and teacher reports, as well as the total score of SDQ and sub-scores of SDQ (i.e., hyperactivity subscale and prosocial behaviour scale), which was also found in the previous study (Allen et al., 2018).
Conclusion HIFAMS-C demonstrated good reliability, moderate construct validity and good gender invariance in primary school children aged from 6 to 13 years old in mainland China. HIFAMS-C can be used as a reliable and valid tool to assess school wellbeing and children’s perceptions of happiness in school. Future studies can be considered to establish the measurement invariance of HIFAMS across different countries and further test its psychometric properties in younger Chinese children (i.e., those under 6 years old).
Keywords School wellbeing, Chinese children, validity and reliability, factor analysis, gender measurement invariance

Authors

• Mengya Zhao, University of Exeter
  Presenting Author

• Dongfang Zhao, University of Exeter

• Xinyu Cheng, Shandong Normal University

• Kate Allen, University of Exeter

• Rachel Hayes, University of Exeter

• Peng Wang, Shandong Normal University

• Tamsin Ford, University of Cambridge