N. Costet et al., FRENCH CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION OF THE HEALTH UTILITIES INDEXES MARK-2 (HUI2) AND MARK-3 (HUI3) CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS, Quality of life research, 7(3), 1998, pp. 245-256
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.