Adaptação transcultural do questionário “Self-Report Form for Children and Adolescents (10 years of age and older)” para transtornos da interação intestino-cérebro em adolescentes brasileiros

Abstract

Considering the increasing internationalization of health care and the multiplicity of languages among patients and professionals, the Roma Foundation initiated the Translation Project — an initiative aimed at the translation and cultural adaptation of its instruments originally developed in English. The main objective is to ensure that these tools are understandable, relevant and functional in different cultural realities. By making standardized diagnostic instruments more widely available, the project promotes a more equitable clinical and scientific practice, integrating global perspectives in the diagnosis, treatment and investigation of gastrointestinal disorders. To translate and perform the cross-cultural adaptation of the questionnaire “Self Report Form for Children and Adolescents (10 years of age and older)” developed by the Roma Foundation into Brazilian Portuguese. This is a methodological study, carried out for the translation and cross-cultural adaptation of a measurement instrument, which considered the twelve recommendations of the COSMIN checklist (Table 1), and the steps of the protocol developed by Tomé et al. (2025), namely: preparation; translation; reconciliation; back-translation; review of the back-translation; cognitive debriefing; final review; calculation of the content validity index; and approval by the Roma Foundation. During the translation process, we chose a linguistic formulation accessible to the target audience, considering the application in regions with sociocultural profiles of national scope. In the back-translation phase, it was observed that most of the items remained practically identical to the original version, which indicates a strong conceptual correspondence between the languages. The cognitive assessment stage demonstrated, after two cycles, adequate comprehension, demonstrating that the instrument is intelligible and easy to apply. The analysis performed by a committee of five experts generated a content validity index of 0.96, reinforcing the solidity of the cross-cultural adaptation. The Brazilian version of the diagnostic questionnaire “Self-Report Form for Children and Adolescents (10 years or more) Rome IV”, for diagnosing disorders of the brain-gut axis, successfully passed all the adaptation stages and received official approval from the Roma Foundation, which enables its use in epidemiological research in Brazil and other international contexts.