The McGill Illness Narrative Interview - MINI: translation and cross-cultural adaptation into Portuguese

This paper presents the process of translation and cultural adaptation into Portuguese of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview - MINI, an interview protocol that is used to research meanings and modes of narrating illness experiences, tested, in the Brazilian context, for psychiatric and cancer-related problems. Two translations and their respective back-translations were developed. In addition, semantic equivalence was evaluated, a synthesis version and a final version were prepared, and two pre-tests were administered to the target populations (people with auditory verbal hallucinations or breast cancer). A high degree of semantic equivalence was found between the original instrument and the translation/back-translation pairs, and also in the perspective of referential and general meanings. The semantic and operational equivalence of the proposed modifications was confirmed in the pre-tests. Therefore, the first adaptation of an interview protocol that elicits the production of narratives about illness experiences has been provided for the Brazilian context.