CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION AND VALIDATION OF AN ARGENTINE SPANISH VERSION OF THE STANFORD CHILDHOOD HEALTH ASSESSMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

Objectives, To translate into Argentine Spanish and cross-culturally a dapt the Childhood Health Assessment Questionnaire (CHAQ) and validate the adapted instrument in Argentine patients with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA). Methods. Five bilingual Argentine pediatric rheumato logists translated into Argentine Spanish and cross-culturally adapted the United States English CHAQ. Pretesting was done in a sample of 23 parents using a probe question technique. Parents of 70 patients with JRA and 21 healthy children (controls) participated in the validation phase. All were from Argentina. Results. The mean disability index (D I) scores for patients with systemic, polyarticular, or pauciarticular onset JRA were 0.64, 0.32, and 0.1, respectively. Healthy controls av eraged 0.2. Intercomponent correlations were between 0.4 and 0.9, sugg esting internal consistency, but also some redundancy. Test-retest rel iability: studied at a 1-week interval, was moderate (mean DI 0.44 [in clinic] and 0.29 [one week later], Pearson's correlation = 0.82). We compared CHAQ scores from 15 parents with those of their children >10 years of age. Significantly higher DI scores were given by patients th an their respective parents (P > 0.019), but the paint ise scores (par ent-patient) were highly correlated (r = 0.986). Conclusions. Cross-cu ltural adaptation of the US CHAQ to Argentina required few changes. Al though DI scores for all patient subgroups were higher than for contro ls subjects, the scores were low, particularly for those with pauciart icular disease. Prospective studies designed to examine the sensitivit y to change and predictive validity will help to assess further the us efulness of the adapted CHAQ in the Argentine population.