The Swedish version of the pelvic girdle questionnaire, cross-cultural adaptation and validation

Abstract

Purpose: The aims of this study were to translate and culturally adapt The Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire to Swedish, and to evaluate the construct and discriminative validity.Materials and methods: A translation and cultural adaptation process was performed according to international guidelines. Pilot tests were conducted among 16 women during pregnancy and post-partum. Analysis of the construct and discriminative validity of the Swedish version of the Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire was performed in a sample of 177 pregnant women suffering from pain in the lumbo-pelvic area. Participants completed the Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire along with Oswestry Disability Index, numeric rating scales for pain intensity and for pelvic girdle pain concerns.Results: The Swedish version of the Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire showed high internal consistency with Cronbach’s alphas between 0.82 and 0.96, good convergent validity with high correlations with the Oswestry Disability Index and the pain intensity numeric rating scale, whereas moderate correlation was shown between the concerns numeric rating scale and the other instruments as hypothesized. Receiver operating characteristic curves showed good discriminatory capacity for women in need of treatment.Conclusions: The Swedish version of the Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire has patient acceptability. It has good construct and discriminative validity for measurements of consequences of pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain among Swedish speaking women.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONPregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain may be disabling and long-lasting, however treatable when identified.The Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire is the only condition-specific, reliability tested and validated questionnaire for pelvic girdle pain.The Swedish version of the Pelvic Girdle Questionnaire has patient acceptability, good construct validity for pelvic girdle pain among Swedish speaking women, and shows good discriminative capacity for women in need of treatment.