Translation and adaptation of three English tinnitus patient-reported outcome measures to Spanish

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to improve the range of standardised tinnitus Spanish Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) available by translating and ensuring cross-cultural adaptation of three English PROMs to Spanish.

Design: The Tinnitus and Hearing Survey, Tinnitus Cognition Questionnaire, and Tinnitus Qualities Questionnaire were translated to Spanish using recently established good practice guidelines.

Study sample: The translation process addressed 22 items included in six main steps specified in the guidelines. The translated PROMs were field tested on a sample of tinnitus patients who were recruited through convenience sampling using cognitive debriefing (n = 5) and pilot testing (n = 10) methods.

Results: The translation process employed the required steps and provided specific details about the process and procedures. In addition, practical issues encountered while translating and adapting the questionnaires that may influence future translations were revealed.

Conclusions: This is the first account of translating and adapting PROMs from one language to another using the good practice guidelines specific to hearing-related questionnaires. Following the rigorous procedures should ensure that the translated PROMs have linguistic and cultural equivalence to the original versions, although psychometric evaluation would remain necessary to confirm the functional equivalence.

Keywords:

• Tinnitus
• questionnaires
• patient-reported outcome measures
• translation
• cross-cultural adaptation

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Dr. James Henry for permission to use the Tinnitus and Hearing Survey in this study and also for his helpful comments during translation process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported (in part) by the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institute of Health (NIH) under the award number [R21DC017214].