Measurement of perceived competence in Dutch children with mild intellectual disabilities.
A picture scale that works for typical kids also gives stable, valid self-competence scores for children with mild intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers tested a picture-based self-competence scale on 106 Dutch children with mild intellectual disability.
The scale was already known to work with typical kids. They wanted to see if it still gave reliable scores four months later.
What they found
The pictures held up. The scale stayed consistent over time and measured what it claims to measure.
Kids could point to faces and give stable answers about how good they felt at school tasks.
How this fits with other research
Lecavalier et al. (2006) reviewed many Likert tools and found they only work for mild ID when you add pictures, pretests, and simple words. The Dutch scale follows every rule they list.
Kaiser et al. (2022) tried the SDQ self-report with children who have IDD and got weak reliability. Their text-heavy format may explain why Hatton et al. (2005) succeeded with pictures.
Madden et al. (2003) showed adults with mild ID can reliably rate their own anxiety using a short, clear scale. Together these studies build a pattern: simple, visual formats let people with mild ID speak for themselves.
Why it matters
You can trust picture-based self-ratings for mild ID. Use them at intake, before IEP meetings, or to track social-skills groups. One concrete step: add the four-page pictorial scale to your assessment kit and let the child point instead of answer out loud.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Little research has been conducted on the perceived competence of children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). One of the reasons for the marked absence of research appears to be the lack of reliable and clearly valid measurement instruments for this particular group of children. In the present study, it was examined whether a pictorial scale originally designed to measure perceived competence in typically developing children could successfully be used with children with MID. METHODS: The pictorial scale was administered to a group of 106 children with MID. The construct validity, reliability and stability of the scale were investigated. RESULTS: The results of the exploratory factor analyses and the confirmatory factor analyses supported the conceptual framework proposed. The construct validity was also supported by the pattern of intercorrelations between the subscales. The scale had adequate internal consistency and the stability analyses showed sufficient stability across a 4-month period. CONCLUSIONS: The findings show the psychometric properties of the pictorial scale to justify its use with children with MID.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2005 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00653.x