Cultural adaptation of a supportive care needs measure for Hispanic men cancer survivors

Research with ethnic minority populations requires instrumentation that is cultural and linguistically relevant. The aim of this study was to translate and culturally adapt the Cancer Survivor Unmet Needs measure into Spanish.

We describe the iterative, community-engaged consensus-building approaches used to adapt the instrument for Hispanic male cancer survivors. We used an exploratory sequential mixed method study design. Methods included translation and back-translation, focus groups with cancer survivors (n = 18) and providers (n = 5), use of cognitive interview techniques to evaluate the comprehension and acceptability of the adapted instrument with survivors (n = 12), ongoing input from the project's community advisory board, and preliminary psychometric analysis (n = 84).

The process emphasized conceptual, content, semantic, and technical equivalence. Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches offered a rigorous, systematic, and contextual approach to translation alone and supports the cultural adaptation of this measure in a purposeful and relevant manner.

Our findings highlight the importance of going beyond translation when adapting measures for cross-cultural populations and illustrate the importance of taking culture, literacy, and language into consideration.