Estrutura Fatorial do WISC-III em crianças com dificuldades de aprendizagem: uma validação em amostra brasileira

Abstract

The adaptation of a psychological instrument to another cultural environment requires that its rules, validity and reliability be revised. Although the WISC-III has already been adapted to the Brazilian context, further studies on the verification of its construction validity should be performed when used in clinical groups. This work contributes to this research and to the investigation of a factorial model that is more appropriate for Brazilian children with learning disabilities (LD). An amount of 263 WISC-III test protocols performed in public school students referred by their teachers by having difficulties in reading, writing and/or arithmetic after a psychological evaluation were analyzed. Statistical techniques of Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were performed. This study, besides corroborating the factor structure defined in the Brazilian standardization, meets the results of the international research for the definition of four-factor model as the best adjusting for the LD population. Although we also have identified two three-factor models as advantageous as to the fit, parsimony and theoretical interpretability, the four-factorial structure is the most suitable for clinical interpretation of the scores that express the AD group cognitive abilities, since it allows us to leverage existing standards of WISC -III for the general population