Design and Content Validity of Health Games for children with Atopic Dermatitis

Abstract

The success of managing atopic dermatitis (AD) largely depends on patient adherence to treatment. Achieving adherence requires more than knowledge transfer; it also requires a change in patients’ health behavior. Therefore, we conducted this study to develop and validate the content of health games for the pediatric population with AD. This study focused on developing and validating the content of health games about AD. Among these were the book Oli e o Grande Desafio da Coceira™ (“Oli and the Great Itching Challenge”) and the games Dermatrilha™ (“Dermatrail”) and Caixinha Surpresa da Dermatite™ (“Dermatitis Surprise Box”). The instrument development process consisted of five stages: planning of the instruments, development of the instruments, development of content validation questionnaires, evaluation by an expert committee, and a pre-test with the target audience. The expert committee comprised 20 professionals: 5 pediatric dermatologists, 5 hospital psychologists, 5 illustrators/designers, and 5 early childhood education teachers. The target audience comprised 25 children with AD aged 5 to 12 years. The content validity index was 0.94 in the evaluation by the expert committee and 0.95 in the evaluation by the target audience. Among the games, the general content validity index was 0.95 among the members of the expert committee and 0.92 among the target audience, being higher than 0.80 for all items. The health games evaluated in this study are useful psychoeducational tools with high content validity for use in the therapeutic education of children with AD.