Psychometric Properties of Persian Version of “Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment” For Iranian Children

Background: Play, particularly pretend play, has a cognitive basis and has been linked to the language and social ability.
Objectives: The goal of this study was to examine face and content validity, inter-rater, intra-rater and test-retest reliability of the Persian translation of the child-initiated pretend play assessment
Methods: Ten occupational therapists consented to be in the content validity study. Face validity was examined by five occupational therapy specialists. For reliability, 31 typically developing children aged 4 - 6 years were chosen from kindergartens of four regions of Tehran, Iran. Two weeks after the initial assessment the children were re-tested for test-retest reliability. Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability was scored from videos of the children’s play assessment.
Results: To be culturally appropriate for Iran, somephrases were changedandthe pigs were replaced by dogs. Content validity index (CVI) and content validity ratio (CVR) were acceptable for all items. The Intra-class correlation coefficient was ICC = 0.99 for intrarater reliability and ICC = 0.98 for inter-rater reliability. For test-retest reliability, the intra-class correlation coefficient for symbolic and combined object substitution scores and all elaborate play scores ranged from ICC = 0.69 to - 0.99. For imitated actions, the majority of children scored 0 on both test and re-test.
Conclusions: The Persian version of child initiated pretend play assessment has appropriate face and content validity. Inter-rater and intra-rater reliability were excellent. PEPA, combined and symbolic NOS showed good to excellent test-retest reliability. Test retest reliability for conventional NOS was moderate and NIA was not stable with more children imitating the examiner in the first test but not the re-test.

Keywords
Face Validity; Test-Retest Reliability; Reliability and Validity; Child; Play and Playthings