Cross-cultural adaptation of a questionnaire that evaluates physical activity among children aged 10 and 11

To adapt to certain cultural patterns and to localize into Spanish the Previous Day Physical Activity Recall questionnaire and to evaluate its content, acceptability and reliability.

The Previous Day Physical Activity Recall questionnaire was subjected to a process of direct translation, back translation and final pretesting. Judges assessed their semantic, idiomatic and conceptual equivalences. A preliminary version was pretested. Afterwards, a reliability analysis was made through a test-retesting. According to the committee of judges the rate of agreement was determined using the content validity index and the mean of the judges' scores. Acceptability, through the number of questionnaires with mismatching answers. Reliability was assessed by the stability criterion.

The translated version of the questionnaire reached appropriate semantic, idiomatic and conceptual equivalences with a high content validity index in all the evaluated documents. The 32 schoolchildren that did the pretest employed a mean time of 18 minutes to complete it; 6 subjects replied, at least, 1 mismatched answer; only one questionnaire was discarded (more than 4 mismatch answers). The test-retesting analysis, conducted with 73 school children, showed an intra class correlation coefficient of 0.99 regarding the total metabolic equivalents and of 0.98 and 0.97 for the moderate and vigorous physical activity blocks, respectively.

The adaptation to certain cultural patterns and the localization into the Spanish language of the Previous Day Physical Activity Recall questionnaire showed successful results in each of the studied settings.