Kids' Life and Times: using an Internet survey to measure children's health-related quality of life

To examine the psychometric properties of an Internet version of a children and young person's quality of life measure originally designed as a paper questionnaire. Participants were 3,440 children aged 10 and 11 years in Northern Ireland who completed the KIDSCREEN-27 online as part of a general attitudinal survey. The questionnaire was animated using cartoon characters that are familiar to most children and the questions appeared on screen and were read aloud by actors. Exploratory principal component analysis of the online version of the questionnaire supported the existence of five components in line with the paper version. The items loaded on the components that would be expected based on previous findings with five domains-physical well-being, psychological well-being, autonomy and parents, social support and peers, and school environment. Internal consistency reliability of the five domains was measured using Cronbach's alpha, and the results suggested that the scale scores were reliable. The domain scores were similar to those reported in the literature for the paper version. These results suggest that the factor structure and internal consistency reliability scores of the KIDSCREEN-27 embedded within an online survey are comparable to those reported in the literature for the paper version.