FRENCH CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION OF THE HEALTH UTILITIES INDEXES MARK-2 (HUI2) AND MARK-3 (HUI3) CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS

The McMaster Health Utilities Indexes Mark 2 (HUI2) and 3 (HUI3) are m ultiattribute health classification systems, for which multiattribute preference functions have been developed in Canada. They provide a com prehensive instrument for use in economic evaluations and population h ealth survey studies. This paper reports on the first results on the a daptation of the HUI2 and HUI3 systems cross-culturally and the assess ment of the validity and reliability of the French self-report questio nnaire in different patient populations. The cross-cultural adaptation included translation, backtranslations, an expert consensus meeting a nd pre-test with a few patients and healthy subjects in order to produ ce a conceptually equivalent French version of the 15 question self-re port questionnaire and the HUI2 and HUI3 classification systems. Diffe rent groups of patients attending specialized clinics (n = 709) comple ted the questionnaire and another generic questionnaire (the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP)) for validity assessment. Physicians and patients were also asked for a global subjective assessment of the patient's h ealth status. The French questionnaire was well received by the patien ts. The criterion and convergent validities of both classification sys tems (correlations with the patients' and physicians' assessments and with the responses to the SIP questionnaire) were satisfactory. The in ternal consistency was acceptable too (Cronbach's alpha = 0.81), as wa s the 3 day test-retest reproducibility. These first results authorize careful use of the 15 question self-report questionnaire in French. A n assessment of the multiattribute preference function for the HUI3 sy stem in France will be the study's next objective. (C) 1998 Lippincott -Raven Publishers.