Development, validation and application of a questionnaire to qualify the indoor environmental exposure of patients with respiratory allergy

Abstract

Objective

Environmental control includes measures to prevent exposure to common aeroallergens in an individual’s home. Questionnaires are part of the clinical practice of health assessment, and are also widely used in research. Our aim was to develop and validate a questionnaire to identify possible sources of aeroallergens present in the indoor environment.

Methods

This study describes the development, validation and application of a questionnaire. For content validation the Content Validation Index and Ordinal Cronbach’s Alpha Index have been used; Polychoric Correlations for the agreement between judges; and an Exploratory Factor Analysis for the structure of the questionnaire, while for reliability assessment, Intraclass Correlation Coefficient has been applied.

Results

Twenty-one doctors participated as judges to validate the questionnaire, which 204 patients answered. The Content Validity Index for all the questions on the “Clarity” aspect was 0.846 ± 0.152 and on the “Relevance” aspect, 0.954 ± 0.080. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the “Clarity” aspect was 0.88 with a 95% confidence intervals (CI) and the “Relevance” aspect, 0.94 with a 95% CI. The average Intraclass Correlation Coefficient was 0.94 and all the F tests were highly significant.

Conclusions

The questionnaire developed by our group was considered valid and reliable, and is capable of portraying the home environment without the need for a personal visit to the patient’s home. This questionnaire would be a good tool to use in research or during patient consultations to assess the patient’s home environment, as this latter assessment is essential for the management of patients with respiratory allergies.

Keywords:

• Respiratory allergy
• aeroallergens
• atopy
• asthma
• environmental control
• indoor environmental exposure
• questionnaires
• validation

Acknowledgements

We thank Thais Pereda from University of Sao Paulo, School of Medicine for her collaboration during the questionnaire elaboration.

Authors’ contributions

Bárbara de Souza contributed to the study concept and design, data collection, writing manuscript, critical review of the literature, final approval of final version of the manuscript. Marcelo Alves Ferreira contributed to the statistical analysis and interpretation. Jorge Kalil contributed to the final approval of final version of the manuscript. Pedro Giavina-Bianchi contributed to the data analysis and interpretation, final approval of final version of the manuscript. Rosana Câmara Agondi contributed to the study concept and design, data analysis and interpretation, writing manuscript, critical review of the literature and final approval of final version of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.