Abstract
To present the Griffiths Mental Development Scale (GMDS), as well as its cross-cultural adaptation to Brazil. GMDS is a diagnostic tool for assessing child development. The result of its application allows verifying if development is typical or if there are alterations in a certain specific area (gross motor, personal-social, language, fine-adaptive motor and execution) or global development. After contact with the authors, permission to use GMDS was obtained and in compliance with ethical aspects, the Portuguese version of the instrument was adapted to Brazilian Portuguese with maintenance of semantic, idiomatic, experimental and conceptual equivalences. The adaptation was carried out by two speech therapists, experienced in evaluating infants, who were submitted to training course prior to the application of the instrument. The adapted final version was applied to 21 infants with typical development. Thirty-nine items were adapted without any exclusion. All items were possible to be applied, suitable for the target age group, with no response in any item. GMDS has been trans-culturally adapted in several countries and widely used for performing diagnosis in the age group essential for stimulation with brain plasticity in full development. The cross-cultural adaptation of GMDS for Brazil was carried out, transforming the Brazilian scenario in relation to child care. After normalization and verification of psychometric measures, it was possible, in addition to early diagnosis, to improve the quality of care for this population; carry out cross-cultural studies and publish the results in international journals regarding the feasibility of GMDS being accepted and used worldwide.
Highlights
Evaluating and diagnosing developmental changes in infants and children is of inestimable importance in relation to the possibility of performing essential stimulation, reducing or healing losses and sequelae throughout life, minimizing consequences in the family environment as well as optimizing the public services that this child comes to need.This process is based on the knowledge about brain plasticity, which is vulnerable to environmental manipulations, with specific stimuli, opening the path for the treatment of neurological disorders, with the possibility of a favorable prognosis[1,2]
The Griffiths Mental Development Scale (GMDS) Portugal Tutors Group, responsible for the version of the Portuguese-language scale, with the consent of the ARICD (Association for Research in Infant and Child Development), authorized the authors to carry out the cross-cultural adaptation of the GMDS to Brazilian Portuguese, as well as its standardization for infants
Speech therapists who performed the adaptation of the European Portuguese (EP) words and expressions to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) performed 23.1% (N = 9) of semantic equivalence, 23.1% (N = 9) of idiomatic equivalence, 51.3% (N = 20) of experimental equivalence and 2.5% (N = 1) of conceptual equivalence
Summary
Evaluating and diagnosing developmental changes in infants and children is of inestimable importance in relation to the possibility of performing essential stimulation, reducing or healing losses and sequelae throughout life, minimizing consequences in the family environment as well as optimizing the public services that this child comes to need.This process is based on the knowledge about brain plasticity, which is vulnerable to environmental manipulations, with specific stimuli, opening the path for the treatment of neurological disorders, with the possibility of a favorable prognosis[1,2]. Evaluating and diagnosing developmental changes in infants and children is of inestimable importance in relation to the possibility of performing essential stimulation, reducing or healing losses and sequelae throughout life, minimizing consequences in the family environment as well as optimizing the public services that this child comes to need. The Griffiths Mental Development Scale (GMDS) evaluates the fine, gross, linguistic, cognitive, and personal-social motor areas of children from zero to eight years old, making it possible to verify and monitor typical development or to diagnose global developmental disorder as well as being specific in areas it evaluates It is widely used abroad, adapted and standardized for several countries[4,5,6]. It can be used to monitor the typical development[7,8] or to diagnose changes in developmental areas in cases of global disorders[9], genetic or metabolic syndromes[10,11], prematurity[12,13], muscular dystrophy and autism spectrum disorder[14], among others
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