Abstract
The transition from early childhood to teen years (5-12) is a critical time of development, which can be made particularly challenging by a burn injury. Assessing postburn recovery during these years is important for improving pediatric survivors' development and health outcomes. Few validated burn-specific measures exist for this age group. The purpose of this study was to generate item pools that will be used to create a future computerized adaptive test (CAT) assessing postburn recovery in school-aged children. Item pool development was guided by the previously developed School-Aged Life Impact Burn Recovery Evaluation (SA-LIBRE5-12) conceptual framework. The item pool development process involved a systematic literature review, extraction of candidate items from existing legacy measures, iterative item review during expert consensus meetings, and parent cognitive interviews. The iterative item review with experts consisted of six rounds. A total of 10 parent cognitive interviews were conducted. The three broad themes of concern were items that needed 1) clarification, needed context, or were vague, 2) age dependence and relevance, and 3) word choice. The cognitive interviews indicated that survey instructions, recall period, item stem, and response choices were interpretable by respondents. Final item pool based on parental feedback consists of 57, 81, and 60 items in physical, psychological, and family and social functioning, respectively. Developed item pools (n = 198) in three domains are consistent with the existing conceptual framework. The next step involves field testing the item pool and calibration using item response theory to develop and validate the SA-LIBRE5-12 CAT Profile.