The Szenario-Kids: Psychometric properties of a novel, participation-oriented language assessment as determined in children and youth without communication deficits

Background: Creating a holistic picture of children and youth who suffer from acquired aphasia or another (developmental) language disorders is very difficult due to missing diagnostic instruments covering participation. Szenario-Kids is a new diagnostic instrument to measure multimodal communication abilities in everyday life situations of children and youth aged 6 to 16 years. Aims: We aimed to examine feasibility and psychometric properties of the model-based Szenario-Kids in the healthy population, to build the basis for later test evaluation in the language-impaired patient group. Method: Szenario-Kids was administered to n  =  57 children and youth without communication deficits (mean age 9.16 years; German as native language). The diagnostic instrument was presented twice within two weeks, complemented by standardized diagnostic instruments to cover all communication modalities and enable correlation of performance between tests. Results: Data analysis showed good practicability, satisfying parallelism of test versions A and B (p  =  .098-.845), acceptable to excellent reliability (Cronbach's α  =  .781-.920) and high interrater reliability (ICC  =  .733-.960), very strong test-retest correlation (r  =  .736-.893) and moderate to strong concurrent validity (r  =  -.475-.611; p ≤ .01). Conclusions: The analysis of feasibility and psychometric properties revealed promising results for the group without communication deficits. Neurolinguistic underpinnings can be explained within our Multimodal Communication Model (MCM). Thus, the evaluation of Szenario-Kids in language-impaired children and youth is a next step.