Reliability of the Supports Intensity Scale (French version).
The French SIS is as reliable as the English one—safe to use for Quebec clients.
01Research in Context
What this study did
A team in Quebec translated the Supports Intensity Scale into French.
They gave the French form to the adults with intellectual disability.
Then they ran the same math checks used on the English original.
What they found
Cronbach’s alpha was 0.97—same near-perfect mark as the English form.
Test-retest scores also matched the U.S. data point for point.
Bottom line: the French version is just as reliable.
How this fits with other research
Hong et al. (2021) did the same kind of job in Saudi Arabia. They adapted two child scales into Arabic and got sky-high alphas, too.
Parvizi et al. (2026) followed the same steps for a Persian feeding scale. All three studies show one clear path: translate, then prove the numbers still hold.
Golubović et al. (2013) looked at quality-of-life ratings instead of scale reliability. They found teens and parents often disagree. That warns us: good reliability does not guarantee different informants will answer the same way.
Why it matters
If you serve French-speaking clients in Canada, you can now trust the French SIS to size up support needs. No need to wonder if lost-in-translation changed the meaning. Use it to set funding levels, write goals, or show insurers why hours are needed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The definition of intellectual disability, according to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, includes the assumption that adequate supports should improve a person's functioning. Consequently, support needs have to be assessed to plan services for persons with intellectual disability. The Supports Intensity Scale (SIS; J. R. Thompson et al., 2004) is a standardized instrument for assessing support needs and their intensity. This study was designed to estimate the interrespondent, interinterviewer coefficients of the French version of the SIS. Approximately 40 persons with intellectual disabilities from Quebec, a Canadian province, participated in this study. For each participant, 2 respondents and 2 interviewers were identified and 3 French SIS questionnaires were filled out. Results are presented and discussed compared with those obtained with the original, English-based SIS.
Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2009 · doi:10.1352/2009.47:24-30