Translation and cultural adaptation of the Children’s Hand-Use Experience Questionnaire (CHEQ) for Brazilian children and adolescents.

Abstract

The Children’s Hand-Use Experience Questionnaire (CHEQ) assesses how children and adolescents with asymmetric impairments such as hemiparetic cerebral palsy (CP) use their affected hand during bimanual activities on their daily routine. The CHEQ provides information about the efficiency of the affected hand, time spent and the level of discomfort felt during each activity. The aim of this study was to translate the CHEQ to Brazilian Portuguese, to assess semantic and conceptual equivalence, to adapt it culturally to the Brazilian population and to test its adequacy in a group of children/adolescents. This methodologic study included five steps: individualized translation by two translators; unified version of the translation; back-translation; specialists’ analysis and questionnaire administration in 31 children/adolescents with hemiparetic spastic CP and their parents. Most of the participants reported no difficulties in answering any of the questions and stated that all the activities presented on the test were part of the child/adolescent’s normal routine, which demonstrates cross-cultural success of the assessment tool. The Brazilian Portuguese version of the CHEQ offers an adequate tool to document children/adolescents’ experience with their affected hands during day-to-day activities, thus useful for clinical and research purposes.