Scientific background: KINDL (Children 7-13)
About this test
The KINDL was developed in 1994 by Prof. Monika Bullinger and revised into the KINDL-R in 1998 by Prof. Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer and Bullinger. It's one of the most established instruments internationally for measuring health-related quality of life in children and adolescents, translated into more than 30 languages and used in numerous national and international studies. The six-factor structure (physical, emotional, self-esteem, family, friends, school) has been confirmed across many validation studies. Important: the official KINDL manual itself doesn't define severity categories like "low/typical/high" -- its own scoring compares the 0-100 scale scores against age- and sex-specific population norms, which exist for Germany (from the nationally representative KiGGS study) but not for a comparable US or English-speaking sample. The three-tier breakdown used below is Empiralis's own simplified, age-independent orientation aid, not an official category of the instrument, and not a population comparison.
A psychometric evaluation of the English-language version among English-speaking Singaporean children (Wee et al., 2007) found internal consistency ranging from acceptable to good depending on the subscale and age group (alpha .40-.71 for the 7-13 Kid version, .44-.84 for the 14-17 Kiddo version) -- a reminder that, especially at younger ages, individual subscales with only four items each can be less statistically stable than the total score. A separate large-scale psychometric analysis of the original German version (Bullinger et al., 2008, the BELLA study) reports good internal consistency for the total score (Cronbach's alpha = .85 in child/adolescent self-report, .86 in parent report) -- parent and self-ratings agree reasonably well overall, even though they aren't identical.
Dimensions
Physical Well-Being
How the child has felt physically over the past week.
Emotional Well-Being
How the child has felt emotionally over the past week.
Self-Esteem
How the child has seen themselves over the past week.
Family
How the child has experienced the relationship with parents and home life.
Friends
How the child has experienced their friendships over the past week.
School
How the child has experienced school over the past week.
Sources & license
Ravens-Sieberer, U., & Bullinger, M. (1998). Assessing health-related quality of life in chronically ill children with the German KINDL: First psychometric and content-analytical results. Quality of Life Research, 7(5), 399-407.
Per the official terms of use on kindl.org, the KINDL-R is free to use -- including for commercial and pharma-funded studies -- provided the copyright is respected and the original sources are cited in scientific publications. Items are taken from the official English-language Kid-KINDL questionnaire (children's version, ages 7-13), downloaded from kindl.org. The ranges shown on this page (lower/typical/higher) aren't from the official KINDL manual -- it has no fixed categories, only comparisons against age- and sex-specific German population norms. Our breakdown is a simplified, age-independent orientation aid.
https://www.kindl.orgWee, H.-L., Ravens-Sieberer, U., Erhart, M., & Li, S.-C. (2007). Factor structure of the Singapore English version of the KINDL® children quality of life questionnaire. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 5, 4.
Open Access -- source of the English-language reliability figures referenced above.
https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-5-4Bullinger, M., Brutt, A. L., Erhart, M., Ravens-Sieberer, U., & the BELLA study group (2008). Psychometric properties of the KINDL-R questionnaire: results of the BELLA study. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 17(Suppl. 1), 125-132.
Scientific publication, cited as evidence for the psychometric figures on the original version.
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