Adaptação e validação transcultural do teste de avaliação neuropsicológica infantil (TENI)

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Marlí Valgas da Costa
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Funções cognitivas; Precisão; Avaliação digital; Validade; Neuropsicologia pediátrica; Cognição; Psicologia
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/BUOS-B9DH2R

The aim of this study was to adapt and test psychometric reliability and validity of TENI (Test de Evaluatión Neuropsicológica Infantil) for Brazilian children. TENI is a nonverbal test for assessing 3 to 9-year-old childrens executive functions and it was developed in Chile. The current research had three steps. Firstly, the test translations were done, then intelligibility of the naming speed sub-test and children familiarization with the Tablet. Translations and back-translations were done by three specialists fluent in the Spanish language. In the intelligibility study, 52 children participated ranging from 3 to 5 years of age. All the stimuli present in the naming speed sub-test were presented to children in order to identify which ones were and were not part of their vocabulary. The results have shown that most of the children were able to recognize the items of the sub-test (ball and house 100%, elephant, apple and tree 96% and cat 90%). All the children handled the tablet adequately, they demonstrated familiarity with it and were motivated to use it. For the next step in the study of psychometric validity of internal structure, convergent and discriminant validity and reliability of the TENI was applied to 553 children with ages ranging from 3 to 9 years. Subsets of this sample were selected to test other cognitive tests (paper and pen type) in order to evaluate convergent and discriminant features of the TENI: Test of Pre-Literacy Skills and Knowledge (THCP), Rey Complex Figures, some sub-tests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children, 4th edition (WISC IV) and mind theory task. Essentially, the results confirmed that the TENI has adequate psychometric properties. The Exploratory factorial analysis demonstrated that the sub-tests have the same structures as expected by its theoretic model. Internal consistency reliability level was higher than the reference level (0.70). Regarding the sub-tests Mexican House copying and memorizing, the analysis of consistency and absolute agreement of the correction between evaluators indicated an excellent intraclass correlation coefficient (> 0.97). The correlational analysis within the TENI sub-tests and between other tests assessing similar constructs presented moderate to high correlations values, the Mexican House Memory and Lilica (memory) (r = 0.64 p <0.01), Cubes (WISC) and Copy of Mexican House (r = 0.52, p <0.01), Attention task (THCP) and Attention task (TENI) (r = 0.44, p <0.01) and Figures of Rey and Mexican House (r = 0.80, p <0.01). In this regard, the results showed that TENI is an adequate instrument for cognitive evaluation of children aged 3 to 9 in Brazil. TENI meets a new international tendency of utilizing digital resources in the psychological assessment field and the need of psychometric quality assessment of these kind of tests. However, new studies are necessary with an extended sample to other Brazilian states that encompass different socio-cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, an investigation of the temporal stability of the scores through test-retest analysis, Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis and validity of the instrument for use in clinical samples and in the prediction of school performance are recommended.