JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A growing number of health-care professionals are using mobile applications. The mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ) was designed to evaluate the usability of mobile health applications by patients and providers. However, this questionnaire is not available in French.

Objective:

The aim of this study is to translate from English into Canadian French, cross-culturally adapt, and initiate the validation of the original version of the MAUQ for standalone mHealth apps used by French-speaking health-care providers.

Methods:

A cross-cultural research study using the five first steps of the Sousa and Rojjanasrirat (2011) guideline was conducted following 1) an independent and anonymous double translation of the original questionnaire into Canadian French by certified translators, 2) the construction of a consensus version with a third party and the principal researcher based on both translations, 3) an independent and anonymous double back translation of the questionnaire into English by certified translators with no prior knowledge of the original MAUQ, 4) the attainment of a consensus version based on both back translations compared with the original, by the members of a committee, and 5) a pilot testing of the pre-final version with 49 potential users and 10 experts for content validation.

Results:

Five certified translators worked on the forward and back translation. A committee made up of translators, a member of the research team, and a health-care provider with experience in acute care discussed ambiguities and differences between the words, phrases, grammar, and meanings. They made improvements and established a consensus for each of the translated statements. The statements are considered clear with an inter-rater agreement of 99.14% among potential users and 90% among experts. Five statements out of 21 did not exceed the 80% inter-rater agreement of the experts regarding clarity. Following the revisions, modifications, and re-evaluations were carried out by the research team, inter-rater agreement exceeded 80%. Feedback from potential users and experts helped improve the accuracy of the statements. The content validity index of items varied from 0.90 to 1.00 and the overall content validity index was 0.981. Individual Fleiss’ Multirater Kappa of each item was between k=0.89 to 1.00, showing an excellent agreement and increasing confidence in the questionnaire’s content validity.

Conclusions:

This process of translation and cultural adaptation produced a new version of the MAUQ that was validated for later use among the Canadian French-speaking population. An upcoming separate study will investigate the psychometric properties of the adapted questionnaire.