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Updated: Jan 6, 2026
Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
Structural Validity and Measurement Invariance of the Scale of Oral Health Outcomes for 5-Year-Old Children
Matheus França Perazzo1, Ana Flávia Granville-Garcia2, Bianka Fernandes Delmônico1
1Department of Oral Health, Federal University of Goiás (UFG), Goiânia, Brazil.
Background:
Important psychometric approaches (structural validity, measurement invariance) remain underdeveloped in measuring oral health-related quality of life, particularly for preschool children across diverse contexts.
Aim:
This study aimed to evaluate the structural validity of the child's self-reported version of the Scale of Oral Health Outcomes for 5-year-old children (SOHO-5) and test the measurement invariance from cultural and clinical/non-clinical comparison perspectives.
Design:
Three datasets were analysed: two from Brazil and one from the United Kingdom (UK). One Brazilian dataset was derived from clinical data collection (nbr-cl. = 193), while the others were from non-clinical epidemiological school-based studies (nbr-ncl. = 768, nuk-ncl. = 296). Dimensionality was tested through parallel analysis and confirmed by unidimensional indexes. Measurement invariance across datasets was tested via multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
Results:
Unidimensionality was empirically confirmed for all three datasets. The multi-group CFA tests reached partial scalar invariance threshold between the Brazilian and UK non-clinical datasets. However, there was no scalar equivalence when comparing non-clinical with clinical datasets, neither within Brazil nor between countries.
Conclusion:
The child's self-reported version of the SOHO-5 is a unidimensional oral health-related quality-of-life measure that is psychometrically comparable across different cultures (partial scalar invariance), but not between clinical and non-clinical groups.
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