Turkish version of the Cornell Musculoskeletal Discomfort Questionnaire: Cross-cultural adaptation and validation

Objective: This study documented the cross-cultural adaptation, validity, and reliability of the Cornell Musculoskeletal Discomfort Questionnaire (CMDQ) in the Turkish language. Participants: The participant group included 48 Turkish workers. Methods: The cross-cultural adaptation included the translation, synthesis, back-translation, expert committee review and pretest stages. The adapted Turkish version of the CMDQ (T-CMDQ) was validated through self-administration of the tool and a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) among participants. Results: The validity of the T-CMDQ was good; Kappa coefficients between the responses given on the VAS and on the T-CMDQ indicated substantial to almost perfect agreement (ranged between 0.62-0.92 across body parts), and Spearman rank correlation coefficients between the VAS scores and T-CMDQ severity scale responses were all significant (ranged between 0.46-0.83 across body parts). Test-retest reliability of the T-CMDQ was satisfactory; Kappa coefficients, which ranged between 0.56-0.97 across the three scales, indicated moderate to almost perfect agreement between test-retest responses across body parts. Conclusions: This study produced the T-CMDQ with good psychometric properties, presented the first formal validation of the CMDQ and provided useful insights on the cross-cultural adaptation process of a subjective data collection tool which was originally developed in English, into the Turkish language.