Medida de la participación y el ambiente en niños y jóvenes: adaptación y validación para Colombia del PEM-CYⓒ

Abstract

Objective. To cross-culturally adapt and test the psychometric properties of the PEM-CY© (Participation and Environment Measure-Children and Youth) questionnaire for the Colombian population. Method. An instrumental type quantitative empirical research technique was used. The adaptation stage comprised the instrument’s translation considering the equivalencies: semantic, idiomatic, conceptual, experiential, as well as back translation. It also encompassed expert committee and a focus group with the participation of three independent translators, one native translator, nine experts, and nine parents. The pilot test was conducted with 20 participants. The reliability stage consisted of a sample of 560 cases (eight cases per each of the instrument items) of parents or guardians of children and youth with and without disabilities, between 5 and 17 years of age. Five hundred one additional individuals served as secondary informants. Afterward the application of the PEM-CY©, content validity, internal consistency, intra-rater and inter-rater reliability tests, and descriptive analysis of participation and environment were carried out. Results. Translation of the instrument’s 70 items. Seventeen out of the 70 were classified as equivalent items and 53 with difficulty for some word comprehension. One item corresponded to translation as experiential equivalence, 66 as semantic equivalence and three as idiomatic equivalence. The Spanish version for Colombia and the back translation were rated as satisfactory by the original authors. The parents’ perception of the focus group regarding the questionnaire was good and they considered the questions to be clear and understandable. The mean score of the translation difficulty level was 3.201. The inter-rater agreement that was assessed with the Aiken V coefficient was 0.75 for all items, with confidence intervals of a lower limit of . Reliability analyses yielded an overall internal consistency of 0.893, the degree of intra-rater and inter-rater agreement was between moderate and very good, statistically significant (p<0.001) for both participation and environment. Conclusion. The PEM-CY© adaptation for the Colombian population showed satisfactory psychometric properties to be used in the measurement of the participation and environment of children and youth aged 5 to 17 years in Colombia.