Translation and Cross-Cultural Adaptation of the “Early Support Monitoring Protocol”

Abstract

Parents are required to make various decisions after a child’s hearing loss diagnosis. With that in mind, one of the researchers of this study, the father of a child with deaf, did not find any available instrument in the Brazilian literature to support was found to the decision-making process for parents. Considering the importance of assisting parents, caretakers, and professionals who work with Deaf and Hard of Hearing children to monitor and assess the child’s development, this work aims to translate and adapt a monitoring protocol for professionals and parents. For this, we translated and cross-culturally adapted 452 items of the Early Support instrument. The items corresponded to the domains of communication, attention, listening, and vocalization. We selected 25% of the items to be assessed by specialists, which were divided into the categories: (1) cultural adequacy; (2) concept presented; and (3) target audience adequacy. A reverse translation was conducted in this stage of the research. After compiling the data and correcting the probable translation errors, it was possible to analyze the items that were not included in the specialists’ assessment and propose an assessment with new items. Afterward, the translated items were compared with the reviewed version of the instrument (Success From the Start), which comprises 347 items of the two development domains.