Adaptação transcultural e propriedades de medida do ABILHAND-Brasil: uma medida de habilidade manual para indivíduos com hemiparesia

Abstract

The ABILHAND version, specific for stroke subjects, is a questionnaire for the assessment of manual ability and was developed according to the Rasch measurement model, which allows for the conversion of ordinal scores into linear measures. For the application with the Brazilian population, its cultural adaptation is required. The aims of this study were to adapt the ABILHAND for its use in Brazil and to evaluate its measurement properties. The cross-cultural adaptation of the ABILHAND followed standardized procedures. The adapted version, ABILHANDBrazil, was administered to 107 community-dwelling stroke subjects for the assessment of its measurement properties using Rasch Analysis. The results showed that all rating scale categories (Impossible, Difficult, or Easy) were frequently used, ordered, and adequate fitted. The maximal of 5% of erratic items was reached and the principal component analysis of the residuals showed that the manual ability for stroke individuals comprised different contents related to the degree of the paretic upper limb involvement to perform the activities. There were not found high correlations between the items, which indicated the absence of local dependency. The ABILHAND was able to divide the items into about eight levels of difficulty and the sample into about five levels of ability, leading to reliability indices of the item and person of 0.97 and 0.91, respectively. The item-person map had gaps, showing individuals with high manual ability without aligned items, but ceiling effect was minimum. Regarding the cultural invariance analyses, although there were found differences in the item calibrations across the countries, they did not impact the estimates of manual ability. Therefore, the ABILHAND-Brazil demonstrated satisfactory measurement properties for use within both clinical and research contexts in Brazil and cross-cultural validity for use in international/multicentric studies.