Cross-cultural translation and validation of the traumatic injuries distress scale - Spanish version

The Traumatic Injuries Distress Scale is a patient-reported measure capturing experiences of distress following non-catastrophic musculoskeletal injuries. The original English version has shown adequate accuracy for predicting recovery trajectories up to 12 months later. Herein we describe the translation of the English TIDS into the TIDS-Spanish.

The prototype version was developed through a two-step forwards-back translation involving four independent bilingual speakers. 73 participants (51% female, mean age 47 years, 32% acute) with musculoskeletal pain responded to the prototype through an online platform or in paper format through a single administration. A series of hypotheses including correlation with an external standard and factor structure were tested for both concurrent and factorial validity compared to those of the English version.

Despite an overall higher mean TIDS score in the Spanish-speaking participants compared to the original English development cohort, all hypotheses for concurrent associations with external pain criteria were satisfied and the three-factor structure of the original was replicated in the new TIDS-Spanish (CFI = 0.97, TLI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.05).

While prospective data collection is needed to explore the equivalence in prognostic validity, all other analyses indicated psychometric equivalence of the new TIDS-Spanish with the original English version. Implications for RehabilitationThe Traumatic Injuries Distress Scale has previously shown prognostic validity for stratifying people with acute musculoskeletal injury into risk-recovery trajectories.A Spanish-translated version of the TIDS was developed and evaluated for psychometric equivalence with the original English version.Results indicate that we were successful in creating a conceptually and empirically equivalent version of the TIDS for use in Spanish-speaking populations.