Development of a movement questionnaire adapted for Japanese culture for elementary school children

Current tools to evaluate Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) symptoms are not adapted to Japanese cultural and educational contexts. We aimed to develop a new tool, the Developmental Coordination Disorder Checklist (DCDC), that can be applied specifically to elementary school-aged children in Japan, by generating a list of culturally relevant items.

We designed an 18-item questionnaire that was distributed to parents and teachers of elementary school-aged children. The degree of negative influence on a child's life from their motor ability was estimated using a visual analogue scale (VAS).

We analyzed the responses from parents/guardians (n = 1174) and teachers (n = 688) of elementary school children (age range: 75-147 months, 1st-6th grades). An exploratory analysis showed that the DCD items could be divided into three factors: fine motor, gross motor, and catch and throw. Internal consistency reliabilities of each factor and of total DCDC were sufficiently high (all coefficients of Cronbach's alpha: > 0.75). Inter-rater reliability between parent/guardian and teacher was moderate in each sub-score and total DCDC score. Parents/guardians evaluated the degree of difficulty in the fine motor factor more severely than teachers. Total DCDC score was correlated significantly with VAS value (r = 0.545), with each factor in DCDC proving useful in predicting negative impact on daily life.

DCDC is an efficient and culturally relevant assessment tool for DCD symptoms within Japan, particularly for measuring any practical deficits in daily life activities.