Nursing assessment of the adaptive process in individuals with traumatic spinal cord injury: Content validation

Instruments with evidence of validity and supported by theories are necessary for nurses to perform a systematic and accurate assessment that enables clinical reasoning and assertive decision-making, especially when it comes to the process of adapting a person to traumatic spinal cord injury.

To perform content validation of the instrument "Guidelines for nursing assessment of the adaptation process of individuals with traumatic spinal cord injury".

This is a methodological study, a content validation study. The sample of expert judges was a non-probabilistic snowball sampling method, composed of 12 specialists from the clinical and academic fields of orthopedics, traumatology, and rehabilitation. Data collection was conducted using an online questionnaire via Google Forms®.

When analyzing the I-CVI of each item in the instrument, we observed that all were equal to or greater than 0.83, demonstrating that all items reached the adopted cutoff point. Furthermore, there is a sufficiently elevated level of favorable agreement to support the content validity of each criterion and category of the evaluated instrument.

The instrument has evidence of content validity according to item, category, and domain regarding comprehensiveness, clarity/appropriate language, pertinence, and relevance.