Psychometric properties of the Italian Place Standard Tool for Children: validation in primary school children within the PNC Clima national programme

Background: The Place Standard Tool Children’s Version (PST-C) lets children evaluate the quality of places where they live. Developed in Scotland and adapted in over a dozen countries, it had no validated Italian version. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Italian PST-C within a case study of the national research programme PNC E.1 “Salute, Ambiente, Biodiversità e Clima” (PNC Clima).Methods: A sample of 131 children attending the last 2 years of primary school and the first 2 years of middle school (69 boys, 62 girls, aged 9 to 12 years) completed the 14-item instrument on a three-point ordinal scale. Psychometric evaluation included floor and ceiling effects, internal consistency (Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω), structural validity from polychoric correlations, item functioning under Samejima’s graded response model, known-groups validity. Translation equivalence was evaluated using both conventional expert review procedures and multilingual sentence embeddings.Results: Internal consistency was good: α = 0.83 (95% CI [0.77, 0.87]) and ω = 0.86 (95% CI [0.82, 0.89]). Parallel analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFI = 0.904, RMSEA = 0.058) supported a unidimensional structure, with all polychoric loadings ≥ 0.42. Semantic equivalence between versions was high (mean cosine similarity = 0.86). Two findings warrant caution: all items showed ceiling effects above the 15% threshold, and no known-group differences survived correction for multiple testing.Conclusion: Combining COSMIN-based validation, item response theory and AI-based semantic equivalence, the Italian PST-C provides a reliable measure of perceived place quality in children. Future studies should evaluate an expanded response scale and confirm these findings in larger, more diverse populations.