Developing Perception of Severity of Disability Scale (PSDS) and analysis of its psychometric properties

In this study, the validity and reliability studies of Percepiton of Severity of Disability Scale (PSDS) was conducted in order to determine the perceptions of the parents with a child with developmental disability (DD). The necessity of creating and conducting this scale was that there was no scale which have proven its validity and reliability and which has been developed to demonstrate the perceptions of the parents with a child with disability towards their children with DD. There were 8 parents with children aged between 3 and 5 who had interviews in the study, whereas there were 57 parents in the pilot study. On one hand 688 parents included into the main study part and 300 participants were attended to test the validity of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In total 1053 participants participated in this study. The PSDS was designed as Likert scale and data were collected in this direction. The validity and reliability of the PSDS were analyzed. Not only PSDS has met criterion related to criterion validity, construct validity, discriminant validity, content validity within validity data, but also it has met reliability criteria which consists of Cronbach's Alpha reliability, split-half reliability, item-total correlation, upper-lower 27% and test-retest reliability. The PSDS has been finalized as a 34-item scale. The PSDS has been made of five sub-factors which are 9 items of Learning and Achievement, 5 items of Language and Communication, 10 items of Social Interaction, 5 items of Problem Behaviors and 5 items of Daily Life Skills.