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The KIDSCREEN is a European cross-cultural and standardized instrument that assesses ten quality of life dimensions in children, adolescents and their parents. This instrument is used to validate evidences to support general inferences on quality-of-life measures obtained by the Portuguese version of KIDSCREEN- 10 for children and adolescents, in the context of a survey research carried on in Portugal. The present study focuses only on the KIDSCREEN children and adolescents' versions. A sample of 8072 Portuguese children and adolescents attending the 5th grade (19.3%), 6th grade (19.2%), 7th grade (20.3%), 8th (21.6%) and 10th grade (19.7%) in Portuguese schools were inquired, with a mean age of 13.2; SD 2.06, randomly distributed regarding gender. The Portuguese version of KIDSCREEN-10 instrument showed a good Internal Consistency of .78. Chosen fit indexes indicate good fit to the data. Specifically in the final solution the RMSEA was lower than .03 and the upper limit of 90% confidence interval was lower than .05, and CFI was higher than .95. Results indicated that the current 10-item structure is invariant across age groups, nationality and socio-economic level. The KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire is a reliable instrument to estimate the perception of quality of life in children and adolescents. Psychometric guidelines are presented for the Portuguese population aged 10 to 16 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]