OBJECTIVE: The Kidscreen-52 is a questionnaire developed in European countries to assess the health-related quality of life in children and adolescents and to provide proxy measures for parents and guardians. The purpose of this study was to translate the tool into Portuguese, to describe the cross-cultural adaptation and to identify its psychometric properties for a Brazilian population. METHODS: The original questionnaire was translated following international guidelines. Translated versions of the questionnaire were analyzed by a committee of experts. The committee used semantic, idiomatic, cultural and conceptual equivalences as criteria of analysis. The final version of the translated questionnaire was administered to 758 schoolchildren of both genders and 653 parents/guardians, in the city of Londrina, Brazil. In order to identify the psychometric properties, exploratory factorial analysis with varimax rotation were completed. Cronbach's αcoefficient was used to assess the internal consistency of each dimension of the KIDSCREEN-52 associated to health-related quality of life. RESULTS: After minor changes in the translated version, the committee of experts considered that the Portuguese version of the KIDSCREEN-52 questionnaire showed semantic, idiomatic, cultural and conceptual equivalences. The exploratory factorial analysis confirmed that the structure of the ten-dimension health-related quality of life questionnaire explained 63-69% of the total variance and presented reasonable values of internal consistency. The Cronbach's α coefficient ranged from 0.725 to 0.894. CONCLUSIONS: The translation, cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric qualities of the KIDSCREEN-52 questionnaire were satisfactory, enabling its application in future studies in Brazil.
quality of life; questionnaires; validation studies; child; adolescent
