Malaysian adaptation of the physical activity scale for individuals with physical disabilities in individuals with spinal cord injury

Abstract

Purpose: The Physical Activity Scale for Individuals with Physical Disabilities questionnaire provides an assessment of physical activity after spinal cord injury. This study sought to adapt, with cultural competence, the English questionnaire and translate it into Bahasa Malaysia, including evaluation of content and face validity, internal consistency and test–retest reliability, and completion of a factor analysis in order to validate the Malaysian version.

Materials and methods: A total of 250 participants completed the questionnaire that was distributed via email, postal mail, the internet, physically and by word of mouth. Sixty-eight respondents were re-contacted to complete the questionnaire again.

Results: The adapted PASIPD demonstrated adequate internal consistency Cronbach’s α = 0.68 and acceptable test–retest reliability, intraclass correlation = 0.87. Factor analysis extracted four main dimensions for physical activity; factor 1 (heavy housework, home repair, lawn work and gardening), factor 2 (sports and recreation), factor 3 (light housework and caring for another person) and factor 4 (leisure and occupational activities) that accounted for 64% of the physical activities’ total variance.

Conclusion: The Malaysian-adapted English and translated Bahasa Malaysia versions of the questionnaires intended to measure physical activity levels in individuals with spinal cord injury, demonstrated good to acceptable validity and reliability. However, some individual items revealed weak reliability measures. Further work is needed to validate the questionnaire’s criterion validity against other physical activity measures.

Implications for rehabilitation

• The Malaysian adaptation of the Physical Activity Scale for Individuals with Physical Disabilities questionnaire provided preliminary support for its use since it has demonstrated adequate construct validity and reliability.

• The Malaysian adaptation of the Physical Activity Scale for Individuals with Physical Disabilities questionnaire can quantify the physical activity level of community-dwelling individuals with spinal cord injury, whilst deriving descriptive information on their physical activities.

• Deploying the Physical Activity Scale for Individuals with Physical Disabilities questionnaire to a spinal cord injury population in Malaysia may provide the first data on activities of daily living in an Asian developing country.

Keywords:

• Disabled persons
• translations
• leisure activities
• surveys and questionnaires
• sports

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the bilingual translators, the consensus panel committee members and the author of the PASIPD questionnaire, Dr Richard Washburn for their contributions to this work.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest for this research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Malaya Research Grant (RU013-2017B), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.