Cross-cultural adaptation of the EFFECT questionnaire into Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Introduction: Clinical teaching is based on a real work environment, in professional practice settings, such as health services and units, under the supervision of the preceptor. Providing medical teachers with an assessment of their teaching skills is a powerful tool for improving clinical learning for students in training. In this context, the EFFECT (Evaluation and Feedback for Effective Clinical Teaching) questionnaire was developed by Dutch researchers in 2012 for teacher evaluation, being validated based on the literature about medical teaching in the workplace and incorporates the skills of the Canadian competency-based medical curriculum. Objective: To translate and cross-culturally adapt into Brazilian Portuguese and to validate the EFFECT questionnaire for teacher evaluation by Medical students. Method: Cross-cultural adaptation with the following steps: initial translation of the English version, synthesis of translated versions, back-translation, creation of a consensual version in Brazilian Portuguese, with adaptation, review, and analysis of content validity by an expert committee, pre-test with retrospective clarification interview, and reliability analysis by factorial analysis and internal consistency test (Cronbach’s alpha coefficient). Result: In the translation and back-translation stages, the disagreements were related to the use of synonyms and none of the items were modified in terms of their understanding, but in terms of adaptation into the Brazilian context. The evaluation of the expert committee showed the versions maintained the semantic and idiomatic equivalences of the content. Eighty-nine students participated in the pre-test. The internal consistency of the EFFECT questionnaire in Brazilian Portuguese was excellent for all domains, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient ranging from 0.82 to 0.94. Conclusion: The translated and adapted version of the EFFECT questionnaire into Brazilian Portuguese is equivalent to the original instrument and has evidence of high validity and reliability, being able to constitute a national tool to evaluate the efficiency of clinical medicine teaching.