Cross cultural adaptation and validation of the Early Childhood Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) in Peruvian preschoolers

The aim of the present work was to perform semantic adjustment and evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Early Childhood Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS) in Spanish on a sample of the Peruvian population. The study was conducted on a sample of 128 children aged 3-5 years, who attended a public school (Hualmay District, Huaura Province, Lima, Peru) in 2011. The ECOHIS questionnaire, developed to measure the impact of oral conditions and/or experiences of dental treatment on oral health-related quality of life in children under 5 years old and their parents or other family members was adapted cross-culturally and subjected to psychometric tests: validity (in terms of construct and discriminant) and reliability (in terms of internal consistency and stability). The cultural adaptation addressed ECOHIS semantic equivalence (Bordoni et al., 2012) and showed that 80-100% of respondents understood the questions. Construct validity was r = .557 (p < .05) between the scores of the Spanish version of ECOHIS and dental caries experience (dmft). Statistically significant differences (p < .001) were found for ECOHIS values between groups with and without tooth decay. Internal consistency was assessed by Cronbach's alpha (.948) and stability by intra-class correlation (.992). The Peruvian version of ECOHIS demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability, enabling assessment of the impact of oral health problems in children under 5 years old.