To translate the 16-item version of Quality of Life in Children with Epilepsy (QOLCE-16) into Chinese, and conduct reliability and validity analysis in Chinese children with epilepsy.

The International Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT) translation method was adopted. Three bilingual translators pre-translated the source scale, and another three bilingual translators performed back translation. The QOLCE-16 was adjusted through the cognitive interview and expert consultation. This study was a cross-sectional study. Convenience sampling was used to select 256 children with epilepsy who were admitted to the Department of Neurology of Children's Hospital of Shanghai from June to December 2020. All questionnaires were filled out by long-term caregivers, and 256 copies were finally recovered effectively to analyze the reliability and validity of the QOLCE-16 after cultural adjustment in the evaluation of the health-related quality of life of children with epilepsy. A total of 40 subjects were selected from the sample, and the Chinese version of QOLCE-16 was filled out again at an interval of 2 to 3 weeks. Finally, 32 samples were effectively recovered to evaluate the test-retest reliability of the scale.

The Chinese version of QOLCE-16 had 16 items in total, including 4 dimensions of cognition, emotion, social interaction, and physical function. Each item had a good degree of discrimination, and there was a statistical correlation with the total score of the scale (P<0.05) . The scale-level content validity index (S-CVI) was 1.00, and the item-level content validity index (I-CVI) was from 0.89 to 1.00. The KMO value of exploratory factor analysis was 0.909, the eigenvalues of each dimension were 3.482, 3.223, 3.136, 2.955 respectively, and the cumulative variance contribution rate was 79.976%. The Cronbach's α coefficient of the scale was 0.938, and the Cronbach's α coefficient of each dimension was from 0.866 to 0.939. The split-half reliability was 0.814, and the split-half reliability of each dimension ranged from 0.840 to 0.942. The test-retest reliability of the scale was 0.724, and the test-retest reliability of each dimension was from 0.615 to 0.716.

The Chinese version of QOLCE-16 has good reliability and validity, and can be used as a simple tool for evaluating the health-related quality of life of children with epilepsy between 4 and 18 years of age.

Epilepsy; Child; Quality of life; Reliability; Validity