A Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Content Validity of COMFORTneo Scale into Brazilian Portuguese

The instrument used to assess neonatal pain must be adequate regarding the type of pain, population, country, and language to provide the best evidence-based clinical strategies; however, few neonatal pain instruments have been translated and validated for the Brazilian population.

The aim was to perform a cross-cultural adaptation of the COMFORTneo scale into Brazilian Portuguese and to evaluate the content validity of the adapted scale.

The cross-cultural adaptation process followed six main steps: translation, synthesis of the translations, back-translation, submission to the expert committee, final version pretest, being that 65 individuals participated in this stage, including both healthcare professionals and students, and submission to the committee for process appraisal. Additionally, an equivalence form composed of a four-point Likert scale was sent to each committee participant to calculate the content validity index (CVI). The CVI was obtained as the sum of the items ranked as three or four by the experts divided by the total number of experts.

No difficulties were reported in the production of translated versions. The CVI for the final version of the translated instrument was 0.99. The final version was reviewed to correct any possible grammatical errors. The layout was modified as necessary, and instructions on scale scoring were added to facilitate the application, resulting in the COMFORTneo Brazil scale.

The COMFORTneo scale was properly and cross-culturally adapted into Brazilian Portuguese, reaching semantic, idiomatic, experimental, and conceptual equivalence with the original instrument, and a good CVI.