Translation and validation of the communicative activities checklist

• Autor(a) principal: Magalhães, Alexandra Camelo
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/35997
• topic: Aphasia; ICF; Activities; Participation; Communication; COMACT

Introduction: The Communicative Activities Checklist (COMACT) measures the frequency in which communicative activities are done. These are related to Talking, Listening, Reading and Writing activities. This Checklist reveals the type of activities people with aphasia (PWA) do and how this condition limits their realization. COMACT is one of the assessment tools Portuguese speech language therapists would like to use in clinical practice. Aims: To translate the COMACT to European Portuguese (EP); to analyse its validity (content and concurrent validity) and reliability (internal consistency and test-retest) with a sample of Portuguese people with aphasia (PWA) and neurologically healthy people (NHP). Methods: This is a methodological, descriptive and correlational study, that included the following phases: Translation and backtranslation; development of instructions for the use the COMACT; evaluation of the different versions obtained by a committee of specialists (N=6); cognitive debriefing and discussion group about the final version of COMACT-EP with five PWA (content validation); use of COMACT-EP version with a sample of the Portuguese PWA and NHP. Content analysis was also contemplated (qualitative analysis of the data obtained in the cognitive debriefing and calculation of the Content Validity Index-CVI); concurrent validity between COMACT and the Communication Disability Profile (CDP) EP version- activity subscale was analysed using Spearman’s correlation; internal consistency (IC) was analysed with Cronbach’s α; test-retest stability, with 7 days between administrations, was analysed with the Wilcoxon test; the two groups (PWA and NHP) were compared with T-test (continuous variables) and chi-square test (categorical variables). Results: COMACT-EP was used with 15 PWA (7 men; 8 women, with a mean age of 58.46±14.43) and 30 NHP (15 men, 15 women, with a mean age of 49.27±15.58). Various suggestions were made, including the substitution and/or deletion of words and creation of new items. A total of 2 items of the Talk category and 3 items from the Writing category were altered, in order to make them easier to understand and also more culturally relevant. The CVI obtained was excellent. Low correlation values were found between COMACT-EP and CDP-EP versions. Internal consistency for the Talking, Listening and Writing categories of COMACT-EP were low for both groups. The Reading category presented the most adequate and highest Cronbach’s α value for both groups (PWA=0.806; NHP=0.812). Significant differences between groups were found in 6 items of the categories Talking, Listening and Writing, which reflects the impact that aphasia, interlocutors, age and other comorbidities may have on the realization of activities. Test-retest results revealed stability after 7 days, with exception of one item (“Read maps and directions”). Conclusions: It is important to develop more studies, in order to obtain better results in terms of reliability and to better understand what the observed results represent. Therefore, it is necessary to continue the revision/rewording of the items and to include a larger sample of PWA (with a similar age of the NHP group) with greater ethnic, geographic and cultural representation, as well as with different types of aphasia and associated severity.