Model Disability Survey (MDS): Cross-Culturally Adapted Version for Brazil

A methodological study translated and cross-culturally adapted the World Health Organization's Model Disability Survey (MDS) for Brazil. The 474-item instrument underwent a five-stage process involving translators, researchers, and health professionals, with content validity assessed via a pre-test involving 30 participants from the Brazilian Northeast. The resulting Brazilian Portuguese version showed adequate content validity.

Use Cases

• Assessing disability prevalence and functioning based on the 474-item survey structure.
• Cross-cultural validation of health instruments based on the described semantic, idiomatic, experimental, and conceptual equivalence analysis.
• Analyzing survey response patterns based on the pre-test sample of 30 participants from four regions.
• Studying the relationship between self-reported health conditions and disability based on the 127 conditions mentioned in pre-test interviews.

Strengths

• The instrument contains 474 items, providing a detailed assessment structure.
• Content validity was rigorously evaluated with a Content Validity Index (CVI) threshold > 0.80 applied to 1,896 equivalence analyses.
• The adaptation process involved a multi-stage methodology including a pre-test with a 30-participant sample described with demographic details.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The pre-test sample of 30 participants is relatively small and focused on the Brazilian Northeast, which may limit generalizability.

Provenance

Source

World Health Organization's Model Disability Survey (MDS), adapted by Érika Giovana Carvalho da Silva.

Collection Method

Cross-sectional methodological study involving translation, synthesis, reverse translation, expert committee review, and pre-testing.

Geography

Brazil, with pre-test participants from four regions of the Brazilian Northeast.