Psychometric testing of the Chinese version of ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tools Parent’s version (ICAST-P)

•The Chinese version of ICAST-P has a good reliability and validity in Mainland China.•Prevalence of ICAST-P were 2.2%, 62.1%, 69.3%, and 10.2% in 4–6 years old children.•The boys were easily physically disciplined by their parents.•Children who came from non-only child family were easily neglected by their parents. Child maltreatment is a world public health problem, while the characteristics of it are still unclear. A new instrument of child maltreatment, Child Abuse Screening Tool-Parents version (ICAST-P), has been established by dozens of child protection experts, and it has good reliability and validity in many countries. Yet few tools have delineated the characteristics among children aged 4–6 in Mainland China. The purposes of the present study were to translate and validate a Chinese version of the ICAST-P; delineate the characteristics of child maltreatment among Chinese children aged 4–6. Three bilingual and three monolingual experts used the modified translation procedure to translate and establish the Chinese version of the ICAST-P (ICAST-P-C), and two independent samples were recruited to estimate the internal consistency and psychometric testing of ICAST-P-C. The results showed that the similarity of interpretability of ICAST-P-C was satisfactory and the readability was appropriate in mainland China. The inter-rater agreement was 0.98 for similarity of interpretability, and with an acceptable internal consistency (0.60–0.87). A four-factor model was established by confirmatory factor analysis, which supported the conceptual dimensions of the original instrument of violence discipline. Moreover, the prevalence of physical severe discipline, physical moderate discipline, psychological discipline and neglect were 2.2%, 62.1%, 69.3%, and 10.2%, respectively. Boys were easily physically disciplined, and non-only child were easily neglected by their parents. This study translated and established the ICAST-P-C, and its reliability and validity were verified, which suggests that it is an applicable instrument for accessing child maltreatment by 4–6 years old Chinese children’s parents.