Cross-cultural adaptation of Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire needs to assess the measurement properties: a systematic review

Abstract

Objective: To assess the cross-cultural adaptations of the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ).

Study design and setting: English and Chinese databases were searched through December 2017. Cross-cultural adaptation and measurement properties were evaluated using the Guidelines for the Process of Cross-Cultural Adaptation of Self-Report Measures and the Quality Criteria for Psychometric Properties of Health Status Questionnaire.

Results: Among 34 studies, there were 31 RMDQ adaptations for 26 different languages/cultures. In the cross-cultural adaptation process, few studies reported expert committees completely constituted (3/31), and only 10 studies completed the test of the prefinal version (10/31) due to insufficient sample sizes. As for the measurement properties, content validity (31/31) and construct validity (24/31) were assessed in most of the adaptations, whereas internal consistency (0/31), agreement (5/31), responsiveness (3/31), interpretability (6/31), and floor and ceiling effects (6/31) were not.

Conclusion: The Hungarian and Moon's Korean adaptations were the highest quality translations. Where there were multiple adaptations for a language/culture, the Moon's Korean and Fan's simplified Chinese-Chinese Mainland adaptations are recommended over the other Korean or simplified Chinese-Chinese Mainland adaptations. Further studies are required to fully assess the measurement properties of the Arabic-Moroccan, Arabic-Tunisian, German-Austrian, Greek, Gujarati, Kim's Korean, Persian-Iranian, Polish, He's simplified Chinese-Chinese Mainland, Spanish, Spanish-Chilean, Thai, traditional Chinese-Taiwan, and Turkish adaptations of the RMDQ.

Keywords: Cross-cultural adaptation; Low back pain; Measurement property; Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire; Systematic review; Translation.