19768
Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses of the Chinese Version Autism Spectrum Rating Scales
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is unknown in China. Recurrently, a national screening, diagnosis and treatment of ASD are funded by the Ministry of Health was launched to boost autism awareness and clinical and research expertise. Up to now, however, the validated screening instrument is very scarce in China. In particular, before the screening to measure the factor structure of instruments is necessary under the cross-culture environment. As part of this recent program, a national epidemiological survey of ASD among the school-aged population of China was designed. In order to conduct the screening phase of this survey involving 8 sites (n=15000 for each site, total of 120,000), we needed an instrument, properly validated for the Chinese population. After reviewing several instruments, we decide to employ the Autism Spectrum Rating Scale (ASRS) for the epidemiological survey. We report here on the part of our study that aimed at the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (EFA & CFA) of the ASRS in a Chinese normative sample.
Objectives:
This study aimed to investigate the EFA & CFA of the ASRS scale under the cross-culture environment, before its application in Chinese population.
Methods:
1625 community based participants aged 6-12 years old, including 830 boys (51.1%) from 4 sites (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha, and Harbin city) in China were investigated. Parents of the recruited subjects were invited to complete the Chinese version of ASRS questionnaire. EFA were performed based on the 71 items in the original US ASRS scale by using SPSS statistical package. Factor loading below 0.3 were removed from the model. CFA were further performed by using the AMOS statistical package program to evaluate the factor structure of the modified Chinese scale.
Results:
Based on the same selection criteria of factor loadings >.30, our analysis retained 70 items (as opposed to 60 items in the US study) loading on a comparable 3 factor structure. In the CFA modeling, the RMSEA value were 0.043 (<0.05). We obtained 0.818 for CFI, 0.856 for GFI, 0.844 for AGFI, and 0.767 for NNFI, all of which were acceptable (>0.7). The content of the 3 factors was similar to that of the US original study, and therefore the factor names were retained. The only difference is that a change in the items numbers for each factor in the China validation sample, with UB, SC, and SR having now respectively 18, 28 and 24 items. The DSM-IV-TR scale was established based on expert judgment as to which items in the ASRS was mapping closely each of the diagnostic criteria for PDD. Therefore, the DSM-IV-TR scale was used in this study as recommended in the original US manual.
Conclusions:
The Chinese version ASRS was modified that the change in the items numbers for each subscale. However, the modified questionnaire is more suitable for national ASD prevalence screening in Chinese general population.