Translation and validation of the Korean version of the QUAlity of Life Assessment in Spina bifida for Teenagers (QUALAS-T-K)

Linguistic, Content and Face Validity of the Swedish Version of a Quality-of-Life Assessment for Children, Teenagers and Adults with Spina Bifida

“…As a last point, our study found that, despite the short length of QUALAS-C, QUALAS-T and QUALAS-A, the comprehensiveness of the items was reported as good by the study participants, which strengthens their content validity [28,36]. Our initial find-ings are also similar to other studies regarding translating and evaluating QUALAS-C, QUALAS-T and QUALAS-A, indicating that condition-specific HRQoL issues in spina bifida are conceptually equivalent in countries such as Sweden, the US, Korea, Japan and Brazil [21,24,26,27,29,33,34,57].…”

“…While maintaining the semantical equivalence with the original source language instrument, it is not uncommon that the item wording needs to be culturally adapted to the normal speech patterns and colloquialisms of the target country/culture [31,38]. For example, in the Korean [33] and Japanese versions of QUALAS [26,27], questions regarding sexuality were very often not endorsed. Furthermore, in the Korean version of QUALAS: "two participants suggested that it was difficult to understand the content of "if the family treated you differently...", as the meaning of "treated you differently" was unclear, resulting in the decision to add "special treatment or discrimination" to clarify the question.…”

“…These are paramount for the international standardization and pooling of data on rare diseases [32]. The QUALAS questionnaires were developed in the US and have since been translated and evaluated in Japan, Korea and Brazil [21,24,26,27,29,33,34],…”