The Brazilian Portuguese Version of the DISCERN Instrument: Translation Procedures and Psychometric Properties

Abstract

Objectives: To report on the translation procedures and psychometric properties of the DISCERN tool in Brazilian Portuguese.

Methods: Three people translated the DISCERN from English into Brazilian Portuguese. A committee of experts and community representatives evaluated the quality of the 3 versions in 2 online voting rounds. Two native speakers back-translated the questionnaire into English. We compared these versions to the original DISCERN and made small adjustments. The final Brazilian Portuguese version of DISCERN was tested twice by journalism students to evaluate the quality of a text about smoking cessation treatments. We evaluated participants' health literacy with the Short Assessment of Health Literacy for Portuguese-Speaking Adults (SAHL-PA) tool, assessed the internal consistency of the translated questionnaire with the Cronbach test, and measured its reproducibility with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). We then investigated the relationship between DISCERN and SAHL-PA scores and demographic variables.

Results: The participants (n = 126) had no difficulty in using the questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha was 0.865 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.826-0.898), and the ICC between the 2 evaluations was 0.845 (CI 0.717-0.912). The mean health literacy of the participants was adequate. There was no correlation between the DISCERN score and the SAHL-PA score, age, or sex (P > .05).

Conclusions: The Brazilian Portuguese version of the DISCERN questionnaire has excellent internal consistency and good reproducibility. The evaluators' ages, sex, and health literacy did not interfere with the score resulting from the evaluation of the quality of the text.

Keywords: adherence to treatment; communication; communication products; health consumers; information for patients; lay people health dissemination; laypeople; quality evaluation; text quality.