Tools for Assessing Knowledge of Back Health in Adolescents: A Systematic Review Protocol

Back pain is common in adolescents as a result of their typical daily activities. There is a critical need for developing instruments that can assess the adolescents' knowledge of proper posture, because adequate postural habits are essential for preventing back pain and facilitating physical well-being. Unfortunately, there is insufficient understanding about appropriate back health in the general public, even though this knowledge is decisive in the development of physical skills and attainment of health literacy. Furthermore, relevant substantive literature is scarce. Therefore, the proposed systematic review aims to identify instruments that are used for assessing knowledge of back health in adolescents. Relevant search terms and descriptors will be combined, and searches will be carried out in a uniform sequence within the PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library databases. Eligible articles must present data on the assessment of the adolescents' knowledge of back health and describe the applied instrumentation. Articles will be selected by two reviewers independently; all disagreements will be resolved by a third reviewer. Mendeley and the Rayyan software will be used for the systematic review, and the checklist proposed by Brink and Louw will be used to verify the methodological quality of the included studies. Our findings may confirm the relevance of constructing and validating back health instruments for use in Brazil and other countries.