Evaluation of a Hong Kong Chinese version of a self-administered questionnaire for assessing symptom severity and functional status of carpal tunnel syndrome: cross-cultural adaptation and reliability.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the application of a translated version of an established self-administered questionnaire for carpal tunnel syndrome on Chinese patients in Hong Kong. DESIGN: Evaluation of an instrument tool. SETTING: Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong; Holistic Medical Centre, Aberdeen, Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS: Patients with carpal tunnel syndrome, translators. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The adaptation was based on forward-backward translation from English to Chinese (Hong Kong) and vice versa. Meetings with translators, investigators, and patients were organised to generate an acceptable version of the questionnaire. A pilot study was carried out on 20 patients and subsequently minor adjustments were added. Fifty patients were recruited to validate the reliability and internal consistency of the questionnaire. RESULTS: The ordinality of response agreed with the original instrument. Test-retest reproducibility showed no significant difference between tests. The Pearson correlation coefficient ranged from 0.83 to 0.93. Internal consistency was good, at 0.85. CONCLUSION: Through the validation of the Hong Kong Chinese version of the questionnaire, we are able to produce an assessment tool for the local patients. Furthermore, we are able to create a platform for: (i) a cross-national and cross-cultural epidemiological comparison as well as a means of (ii) evaluating different types of treatments.