Psychometric Testing and Semantic Validation of Child Abuse Screening Tool in Urdu Language

Child abuse screening tool (CAST) has been used broadly for measuring maltreatment against children. The present study aimed to translate and validate the Child Abuse Screening Tool for two main purposes. Firstly, this scale was translated to use it as a screening tool for the abused children. Secondly, to determine concurrent validity of indigenous Child Abuse Scale (Malik & Shah, 2007) Revision by Malik and Saeed (2014). The Child Abuse Scale Revised was altered to address issues related to child abuse and sexual abuse in educational institutions, home, work place, by relatives, stranagers and servants. The scale was translated using standardized procedure of forward and backward translation. Confirmatory factor analysis was run to examine the factorial structure of Urdu translation of the scale. Convergent and discriminant analysis revealed construct validity of CAST. The results of CFA show adequate model fit; supporting the five factor solution of original scale. Thus, reliability and validity analysis indicated that the Urdu translated CAST scale is a valid and reliable tool for screening abused children in Pakistan.Keywords: abuse, translation, validity, child maltreatment, Urdu