Development and validation of a questionnaire for assessing knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding communication, language, speech, and swallowing in three to five-year-old children

Understanding parental knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding children’s developmental milestones is essential. Similarly, it is vital to know what parents think about their children’s communication, language, speech, and swallowing. Consequently, designing a questionnaire to obtain this information was necessary. This study reports the process of questionnaire preparation and publishes data about parents’ information—the preparation steps involved designing the questionnaire’s initial version by articles. Experts prepared pre-test versions of relevant items. Next, pre-test version content validity was assessed by the Lauche method in collaboration with ten experts. Then, impact factors were evaluated by 15 parents. Finally, 150 participants completed the pre-test questionnaire. Twenty-six parents evaluated the test-retest reliability score. The final version was tested on 267 parents. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to analyze the data. Through discussion sessions, irrelevant items were removed. Consequently, fifty-two items remained, and due to face validity scores, none received less than 1.5 points. Therefore, this version was conducted as a trial version. Cronbach’s alpha for the study was 0.74, and test-retest reliability was 0.85. Analysis revealed a non-normal distribution with a P-value of less than 0.05. Knowledge levels averaged 9.5, attitudes averaged 74.5, and practice levels averaged 57. Considering validity and reliability scores, the questionnaire is beneficial for assessing parents’ K.A.P. regarding developmental milestones. Using this questionnaire, therapists can recommend parents who are uncertain about their child’s milestones that the parents’ knowledge of these developmental skills is higher than average, but they did not practice them according to scientific facts.