Background: The Burns Specific Health Scale-Revised (BSHS-R) is of easy application, can be self-administered, and it is considered a good scale to evaluate various important life aspects of burn victims.
Objectives: To translate and culturally adapt the BSHS-R into the Brazilian-Portuguese language and to evaluate the internal consistency and convergent validity of the translated BSHS-R.
Methods: The cultural adaptation of the BSHS-R included translation and back-translation, discussions with professionals and patients to ensure conceptual equivalence, semantic evaluation, and pre-test of the instrument. The Final Brazilian-Portuguese Version (FBPV) of the BSHS-R was tested on a group of 115 burn patients for internal consistency and validity of construct (using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)).
Results: All values of Cronbach's alpha were greater than .8, demonstrating that the internal consistency of the FBPV was very high. Self-esteem was highly correlated with affect and body image (r=.59, p<.001), and with interpersonal relationships (r=.51, p<.001). Correlations between the domains of the FBPV and the BDI were all negative but larger in magnitude than the correlations with RSES. Depression was highly correlated with affect and body image (r=-.77, p<.001), and with interpersonal relationships (r=-.67, p<.001).
Conclusions: The results showed that the adapted version of the BSHS-R into Brazilian-Portuguese fulfills the validity and reliability criteria required from an instrument of health status assessment for burn patients.