Publication:

Translation of revised WHO international league against rheumatism community oriented program for the control of rheumatic diseases core English questionnaire into Bengali and its cross-cultural adaptation and validation

Background The World Health Organization (WHO) and the International League Against Rheumatism (ILAR) initiated the Community-Oriented Program for the Control of Rheumatic Diseases (COPCORD) project in 1981. The aim of this study was to translate the revised WHO-ILAR COPCORD questionnaire into Bengali and to test if the Bengali version could be reliably used for the identifying rheumatic diseases in Bangladeshi people.

Methods This was an observational study conducted in rheumatology wing, department of medicine, BSMMU from April to October, 2011. It was implemented in two stages: Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of questionnaire and testing of questionnaire. For translation into Bengali and cross-cultural adaptation, the recommendation by Beaton’s procedure was followed. Respondents were enrolled from rheumatology outpatient departments of medicine, BSMMU, household members and healthy patient’s attendants. Data were collected and analyzed using SPSS windows v16.

Results Thirty subjects completed the preliminary version of the questionnaire. Fifteen males (50%) and fifteen (50%) females were interviewed. Mean age of the respondents were 31.97±10.15 with age range 16-55 years. Test-retest reliability of the Bengali version of the questionnaire was tested by interviewing 70 subjects. To evaluate agreement between two measurement qualitative questions were analyzed using kappa test and quantitative question were tested by spearman’s correlation. Most of the questions (88.2%) showed high or good agreement (kappa agreement >0.6) and one (5.88%) question showed moderate agreement (0.4-0.6). In case of quantitative questions responses in test and re-test were found to have 50% good correlation and remainder poor correlation in Spearman’s correlation.

Conclusions Pretest and reliability has shown the questionnaire clear in wording and culturally appropriate. Process of translation and adaptation using Beaton’s procedure was user friendly, comprehensive and appears an essential method for translation of the questionnaire.