The Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool (MDAT): the creation, validation, and reliability of a tool to assess child development in rural African settings.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Although 80% of children with disabilities live in developing countries, there are few culturally appropriate developmental assessment tools available for these settings. Often tools from the West provide misleading findings in different cultural settings, where some items are unfamiliar and reference values are different from those of Western populations.

Methods and findings

Following preliminary and qualitative studies, we produced a draft developmental assessment tool with 162 items in four domains of development. After face and content validity testing and piloting, we expanded the draft tool to 185 items. We then assessed 1,426 normal rural children aged 0-6 y from rural Malawi and derived age-standardized norms for all items. We examined performance of item

SUBMITTER: Gladstone M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2876049 | biostudies-literature | 2010 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature