TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION OF THE MIDDLE YEARS DEVELOPMENT INSTRUMENT. ROMANIAN VERSION

The middle years’ age is a period of changes and challenges, dueto physical growth and motor skill development, cognitivedevelopment, and socio-emotional development (Harold &Hay, 2005). Cognitive development refers to how a personthinks and perceives his or her world through the action ofgenetic and learned factors. During middle childhood,children’s vocabularies increase, and they also develop theability to express intentions. Socio-emotional developmentrefers to understanding and regulating emotions. Children’sautonomy, their secure emotional development andpsychological well-being are strongly influenced by parentingstyle and disciplinary practices (Harold, 2005). The purposeof this paper was the translation, adaptation, and validationof the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) fromEnglish to Romanian. The aim was to assess the factorstructure of the scale. The methodology used was theExploratory factor analysis and we identified threedimensions of the Instrument: Social and emotionaldevelopment, connectedness, and school experiences of theMDI - Romanian version. We decided to validate thisinstrument on a Romanian sample, because of the goodpsychometric properties of the original scale, whichrecommend it as a reliable tool and thus helps the process ofstudying this age. Results suggest that the translated andadapted instrument is adequate and valid for evaluatingaspects of cognitive and socio-emotional development ofmiddle years’ Romanian children.