Development and preliminary validation of the Inadequate Child Care Scale in China

TL;DR

This study created and tested a new tool to measure child care deficits in China, focusing on daily, emotional, safety, and educational care.

Contribution

The paper introduces the Inadequate Child Care Scale (ICCS), a culturally tailored instrument for measuring child care deficits in China.

Findings

The ICCS has a four-factor structure covering daily, emotional, safety, and educational care.

The scale showed strong psychometric properties, including good reliability and validity.

The ICCS provides a foundation for improving child care policies and interventions in China.

Abstract

Socio-economic changes and evolving family structures have created unique caregiving challenges in China, highlighting the need for tools to systematically measure child care deficits. This study aims to develop and preliminarily validate the Inadequate Child Care Scale (ICCS), a culturally relevant instrument designed to measure deficits in child care specific to the Chinese context.

The development and validation of the Inadequate Child Care Scale (ICCS) were conducted through a three-phase process. Phase One involved the generation of an initial item pool informed by a prior grounded theory study. Phase Two included nationwide data collection via a structured survey administered to participants across diverse regions in China. Phase Three focused on evaluating the psychometric properties of the ICCS using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA; n = 468) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA; n = 702), with an emphasis on assessing convergent validity, discriminant validity, and composite reliability.

The initial item pool comprised 32 items, 30 of which were retained following expert evaluation for content validity. EFA revealed a four-factor structure underlying the scale: Inadequate Daily Life Care, Inadequate Psychological and Emotional Care, Inadequate Safety Care, and Inadequate Educational Care, encompassing 30 items in total. CFA supported the factorial validity of the ICCS, yielding favorable model fit indices (GFI = 0.929, CFI = 0.977, TLI = 0.975, RMSEA = 0.038, χ²/df = 2.025). The scale demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.80) and acceptable test-retest reliability.

The ICCS is a psychometrically sound tool for assessing child care deficits in China. Its development fills a critical gap in child care research and provides a foundation for targeted interventions and policy reforms. Future studies should refine the scale further and explore its applications in broader caregiving contexts.

Figures