Abstract
Methods and instruments to measure the various facets of health status range from ways of calculating mortality and morbidity statistics at regional, national and global levels (e.g., WHO 1991; World Bank 1993) to interview and questionnaire methods for assessing diseases and physical symptoms (e.g., CIDI and SCAN; Pull and Wittchen, 1991), as well as a wealth of instruments for the assessment of impairment, disability, handicap and psychological functioning (see McDowell and Newell 1987; Bowling 1991; WHO 1993a; Walker and Rosser 1993). Most health status measures and psychological tests are used only in the setting in which they were developed. Some are translated into other languages and used without attention to the adaptation that is necessary to ensure their usefulness in another culture or language. A very small number of instruments are produced in equivalent versions in different languages, before assessing the instruments’ validity and reliability that are a prerequisite for the use of instruments in a new culture. We shall argue that both properly conducted translation of existing health status instruments and the development of equivalent versions of an instrument in different languages was time consuming and difficult tasks, yet necessities for comparative study.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Sartorius, N., Kuyken, W. (1994). Translation of Health Status Instruments. In: Orley, J., Kuyken, W. (eds) Quality of Life Assessment: International Perspectives. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79123-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79123-9_1
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