Development of the French-Canadian Version of the Self-Administered Comorbidities Questionnaire (SCQ) in a hospital population undergoing hip or knee arthroplasty

Abstract

The Self-Administered Comorbidity Questionnaire (SCQ) is a tool used by hospitalized patients to self-report their comorbidities. It can help to explain the effectiveness of hip or knee arthroplasty, its complications, the length of hospital stay and perioperative resource utilization.

Hypothesis: The French-Canadian version of the SCQ will be suitable for use in a Canadian hospital population.

Objectives: (1) translate and evaluate the transcultural validity of the SCQ in a French Canadian population undergoing hip or knee arthroplasty; (2) determine the standard error of measurement (SEM) in the French Canadian version.

Materials and methods: The translation and transcultural adaptation process consisted of four steps: (1) initial translation; (2) back translation; (3) assessment of questionnaire clarity with patients; (4) assessment of the translation's transcultural validity. The SEM was also calculated.

Results: Twenty participants were recruited for step 3 and 83 participants for step 4. The original English version of the SCQ and the translated French-Canadian version (SCQ-FC) were similar with intra-class correlation coefficients for the intra-language and inter-language agreement between 0.71 and 0.97. The SEM was 1.92.

Conclusion: The SCQ-FC is comparable to the original English language version. Using this questionnaire allows us to document the comorbidities present in patients undergoing hip and knee arthroplasty in a French-Canadian population, and the impact of these comorbidities on the patients' health.

Level of evidence: V, Prospective study.

Keywords: Arthroplasty; Comorbidity; Psychometric properties; Transcultural validity; Translation.